Life

Life, as some witty person has probably observed at some point, is just one thing after another.

The life of a person is the sequence of their experiences. And the life of a place, or a building, or a piece of software, is made up of the patterns of events that keep on happening there.

Activities; events; forces; situations; lightning strikes; fish die; water flows; lovers quarrel; a cake burns; cats chase each other; a hummingbird sits outside my window; friends come by; my car breaks down; lovers' reunion; children born; grandparents go broke....

My life is full of episodes like this.

The life of every person, animal, plant, creature, is made of similar episodes.

The character of a place, then, is given to it by the episodes which happen there.

...some events happen once in a lifetime; others happen more often; and some happen very often indeed. But although it is true that a unique event can sometimes change our lives completely, or leave its mark on us, it is not too much to say that, by and large, the overall character of our lives is given by those events which keep on recurring over and over again.

And, by the same token, it is roughly true that any system, any aspect of the life of a part of the world, is essentially governed by those situations, human or nonhuman—which keep on repeating there.

—TheTimelessWayOfBuilding p. 62-66

What is a living thing? What is a person? It seems natural to say that a person is made of atoms, but this leads to some strange conclusions, since the atoms that make up our bodies are constantly being exchanged with the environment. After a few years, none of the original atoms are left. We might be tempted to say that a person dies and is reborn every few years, or perhaps even every moment, but this is not a particularly useful theory. It sheds no light on our actual experience of being alive; it is not clear what it would mean to live as if this explanation were true.

The best way I have found to think about living systems is that they are self-sustaining eddies in the "fluid" of matter-imbued space, quite literally just situations where the same patterns of events happen over and over again. Though the physical players are always entering and exiting, the play is always the same.

It is, weirdly, accurate then to say that life is something nonphysical, because patterns have no mass. They can be thought of as pure information. But this does not imply that living things have a disembodied "spirit" or soul; their immaterial patterns are entirely dependent on matter for their existence.

More precisely: living things are Centers.