In praise of fitting things

Daily life often gives us our deepest questions, like this one:

Why don't things fit?

Clothes don't fit. Jobs don't fit. In America one of two marriages end in divorce ... in other words: marriages don't fit.

Here's something that doesn't fit: see the daylight coming through the wood framing at the top corner? The 2x4 wall frames on the greenhouse I'm building don't exactly fit.

Who cares? one might ask. The wall sheathing will cover it, so nobody will know.

Nobody will know.

In the 1990's the influential computer scientist and polymath Herbert Simon coined the term to satisfice, a combination of to suffice and to satisfy:

All any solution has to do is to satisfice. In other words, just get the job done in an okay way; forget about everything fitting perfectly.

In a highly utilitarian / consumerist culture such as ours, satisficing is highly valued. We not only have technologies to fit things together; we have technologies to cover up things that don't.

Studs don't fit? We have sheathing.

You look ugly? Cosmetic surgery.

Can't get along? No fault divorce.

I think one fallout of covering up things that don't fit is the disappearance of praise.

In our culture, we've lost an ability to praise because we've lost an ability to marvel. To marvel at amazing things that do fit -- in fact, that fit so well it is downright unbelievable: Microscopic mitochondria that are veritable factories of life. No covering up there (even though we don't see it).

And I can't even align 2x4s.

I came across an article the other day that reports nature itself -- in the form of bacteria in the water -- is doing her own job at cleaning up the oil spill in the Gulf.

This is not to take away from the magnitude of the disaster.

But come on, as I struggle to align 2x4s, my larger struggle is why I'm not filled with praise at this news.

Logos2Go

Psalm 146.1 How good it is to sing praises to our God, how pleasant and fitting to praise him! (NIV)

Note: This word "fitting" is translated in other versions as "comely" (KJV) or "seemly" (RSV) ... or simply beautiful (NKJV)

Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 1996, MIT Press