1. A neat and popular fact about coastlines is that one cannot really come up with a definitive measure of how long a country’s coastline is. When you measure in more detail, you find that there are inevitably more nooks and crannies that inflate the measurement, and at a finer scale of measurement has more nooks and crannies still.
  2. In The Landscape of History, John Lewis Gaddis makes an analogy between this fractal property of coastlines and a similar property of history. The more detail in which you study something (in this case a historical event, but I think this applies to everything), the more you will find. You cannot know everything there is to know about a topic. (I think of Bible scholarship—this is ostensibly a collection of ~66 fairly short books, but as Hans Küng points out [I forget where], there has been a crazy amount of research covering every tiny aspect of the Bible.)
  3. I think this is one purpose of the “eating meditation” in the Plum Village sense, or any of the other meditations where you focus in detail on one seemingly mundane aspect of your surroundings—once you start looking, there is no end to the things you can find. Same with gratitude journalling.
  4. Perhaps this is part of the skill or mindset that enables monastics to find deep enjoyment in what appears to the casual observer as a spartan lifestyle with very minimal surroundings.
  5. So perhaps one can conclude that paying attention to the fractal nature of the world around us is a way to build self-sufficiency (in the psychological sense).