Emergence…

♫ Please don’t you wake the monster. This home
is happy when she sleeps. Her only motivation is staying strong to keep me weak. She’ll hold my head down to the fire, to watch me burn awhile. ♫
– Playing Dead, Bobaflex

So… as if I don’t already have enough to be behind on… I agreed to co-author a book anthology with a group of friends.  By mid-December.  This year.

The theme is Emergence.

I haven’t even finished one of my own books yet.  So part of me wants to know why I’d put someone else’s project ahead of my own, again.

But the other part of me wants to kick my ass and hard.  Because my books are long overdue, my writing suffers, and my reasons grow more plentiful by the day.  Like losing a piece of my very identity, sacrificed on the altar of necessity and time.

So committing to a smaller project like this, albeit not my own original, is seed energy to rectify my own need to write.

I also wanted to help support the project (spear-headed by a friend) to see to it that it gets off the ground.  Because I’m good for helping to get ideas off the ground.  Thank God in this case I’m not in charge too.  I just have to write, a personal story, by the end of the month.  The same month I’m doing NaBloPoMo. And then later I’ll help promote the book.

What the hell am I doing.

And what value can I possibly add to the subject of Emergence?

I’ve been sent an example idea from someone else’s article, but I’ve not looked at it yet.  Not sure I will.

It dawns on me that I’m probably the youngest in the group, at 43.  And that the theme everyone else is mulling over has a lot to do with revealing a suppression or an evolution in some way.

So, like an Honor Society speech cliché, I looked to the dictionary for a bead on the subject. Some sliver of insight that would make sense for me.

Emergence:
1) the process of coming into view or becoming exposed after being concealed.
2) the process of coming into being, or of becoming important or prominent.

Yeah, not quite that helpful to me yet.  Then I came to the Great “Not-A-Source” king of all, Wikipedia.  Where I found this:

“In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is conceived as a process whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties.”

Perhaps that strikes upon something. I’ll sleep on it and see what comes up.