The Sum of Its Parts: My Fascination with What Man Has Made

Fort Bourtange in Groningen, Netherlands

The only thing more predictable than Cailin writing a blog is Cailin writing her occasional meandering philosophical mumbo-jumbo on said blog. But this is the first one for Mommy Dove, and so for that I believe some introduction is in order. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the segment where I ramble like a Rastafarian at the tail end of a house party.

Today's topic is as big as it gets: my amazement with humanity as a whole and the things we are able to create and produce; my fascination with the sheer volume and intricacy of the manmade.

I am often incredulous as I look around the world at the freeways and airplanes and Venus de Milos that we as a race could have built this. It is not unlike Carmela Soprano's reaction to Paris:

Seriously. How? How can a race of anyone have actually organized themselves enough and channeled all of their collective energy into one place to create such beauty? Such magic? How amazing is it that we've built buildings and cities and cell phones and causeways and ziplining adventure parks and expeditions to Antarctica?

Can the whole of creation really only represent the sum of its parts?

And then sometimes I go to a coffee shop and tic-tic-tic away at my iPad, furiously working on whatever my latest task is. I look around at the cafe's other inhabitants and see them tic-tic-ticking away too. I think of how many thousands of tics contributed to the greater good in my coffee shop alone today. In coffee shops the world over. Cubicles. Office buildings. Forklifts.

And those parts seem that much bigger, that much more important - and the whole makes that much more sense.

How brilliantly tiny and massive we are at once.