A singular link is the fusion of independent elements that together form something novel. One classic archetype of a singular link is the romantic couple. Two people unite to create the relationship, which is its very own entity: the couple-entity. The couple has two constituents (person A and person B) which together develop certain characteristics of coupledom. You may notice this when your friend starts dating someone new and suddenly his behavior changes. He may start wearing different clothes and styling his hair in exotic new ways. His habits meld to the habits of his new partner. He may suddenly take up inexplicable new activities. When a friend of mine started dating, he and his girlfriend took up skydiving together.
The lives of each of the individuals involved in coupledom exist on the same continuum of time that predated their coupledom. Each of them came into this world as little human blobs, grew up, learned some things about how humans interact, and then met to form their romantic relationship. You might say that each person persisted until they met their romantic partner. You might call each of them a persistent element. Why would you call them that? Isn’t that just an unnecessarily convoluted label to describe two people? Well, yes, it is, but it helps to make a point. Stick with me for a minute.
The romantic couple is a singular link with two persistent elements. That is, two elements that persisted until they linked together. However, not all singular links involve two persistent elements. Often they involve one persistent element linking with something spontaneous — let’s call it a spontaneous element.
At the beginning of the classic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, we see a tribe of monkeys getting their monkey butts kicked by a rival tribe until one encountered The Monolith, a tall, smooth stone slab whose presence was baffling to monkeys and movie audiences alike. The Monolith prompted one of the monkeys to realize that a bone could be used as a club, and specifically it could be used to club the leader of the rival monkey tribe and thereby seize the territorial upper hand. Monkey + Monolith = singular link. Previously, the monkeys had been suffering through their precarious monkey-existence, desperately clinging to life. They had managed to persist, however perilously. But then, the Monolith appeared. From the perspective of the persisting monkey, the Monolith was a spontaneous element.
So, unlike the example of the romantic couple, which is a singular link comprised of two persistent elements, the monkey example is a singular link comprised of a persistent element and a spontaneous element.
This paradigm of persistent + spontaneous is common in the art world where artists may spend years developing their work, searching for their voice, until — ah-ha! — a spontaneous influence suddenly changes their trajectory.
The breakthrough is coined by such aphorisms as, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity,” and “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”
Consider human fertility in this context. A woman’s ovulation, which occurs more or less every 28 days during her years of fertility (so I am told), is a persistent element. The egg makes its way to the fallopian tube exclaiming, “Ta-da! Here I am, ready for business!” Most of the time this ovo-persistence is uneventful, at least to the outside world. But every once in a while, when conditions are just right, that persistent element is joined by a spontaneous element. Or, if you will, it is joined by thousands of spontaneous elements swimming frantically as if their lives depended on it because, after all, actually their little cellular lives do depend on it. When the conditions are just right, persistent + spontaneous = baby.
Sometimes we see things from the perspective of the spontaneous element. Just look at the astronautical activity known as the gravitational slingshot. When sending spacecraft long distances, scientists have been known to hurl their contraptions in the precise vicinity of planets, moons and other extraterrestrial bodies so as to affect their trajectories.
The Voyager 1 space probe was launched in 1977 and as of the time of this writing, it has travelled 14.8 billion miles (that’s not a typo). It harnessed the gravitational pull of Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn’s largest moon to help hurl it through space, changing and increasing its velocity as it interacted with the gravitational field of each giant space mass. Clearly, when measuring events in astronomical units of time, the planets are the persistent elements and the man-made space probe is the spontaneous element.
Spotting a rainbow also shows the link between persistence and spontaneity. When meteorological conditions are just right, sunlight shines from behind you to be refracted through water droplets that are located in front of you. The sunlight is the persistent element and the humid air and your orientation to it are the spontaneous elements.
In fact, nature abounds with examples. A spontaneous burst of lightning strikes a tree that persisted for hundreds of years. A meteor (spontaneous) crashes into the Yucatán Peninsula (persistent) to result in the decimation of the dinosaurs, who were persistent until they weren’t. A volcano’s eruption (spontaneous) forms an island in the ocean (persistent). A hurricane scrambles an area’s topology.
An interesting question to explore is, How can you introduce spontaneous influences into your life? Or, if you prefer to view your life as a spontaneous element, How can you link your life with the persistence that exists around you? A good way to begin is with The Four-C Process of Ideation.