'Leaf' your logic

One of the most fantastic parts of autumn is watching the colored leaves fall. If you watch for long enough in the right weather, you can sort of imagine the logic of how leaves fall.

The early-ish morning I imagined the logic of one particular tree; there was no breeze. This left the leaves to fall according to their own dimensions. Some fell down spinning like helicopter seeds, while others dropped like Christmas ornaments off the trees.

All falling styles came interspersed in bursts: a flourish of falling leaves, and then none at all.

The logic I imagine for this phenomenon is this: no matter what class of fall the leaves had, helicopteral or ornamental (because those are the official terms), if they fell from the top of the tree (which I imagine they do, because those are the leaves closest to the elements and whatever else) they would tap or shake loose the leaves below them, and those leaves did the same on their way down, so that by lowest branches, there was the flurry of spinning and dropping colors that sparked my interest.

Of course this is all bogus. There is no logic to the way leaves fall, at least not one that I could catch from a morning of watching.

But that's just what we do isn't it? We explain things. We grab an answer for everything, or create one, or at the very least demand one from someone else. It is hard to imagine that some things are random, that some things are chaotic enough that we wont get a good answer.

Knowledge is an incredible gift that we have at our fingertips in college, but curiosity and wonder are also here in abundance. I don't think that knowledge should teach away our curiosity and wonder with the world; it should inspire it— which is ironic if you think about it.

My roommate Michael told me about a biologist who defended beauty against an artist friend of his. When the artist accused the biologist of only seeing the mechanics of a flower, while the artist explained his own love of the flower's beauty, the scientist responded by cutting the flower in half and explained the wonder of a flower's insides.

There might be a reason for spinning and dropping flurries and bursts of leaves, but that's hardly the great conundrum for our time. It might just be one of the great unnoticed wonders of all time.