I was in the pool this morning and couldn’t resist staring at the light show on the wall and ceiling. It was beautiful, like fire, but not. I think I was the only one who noticed.

Got me thinking about the nature of things, and how so much of what we think of as real or solid, is just a pattern caused by ripples crashing into one another.

I wonder if you had enough computing power, could you examine the reflected light and discern how many people were in the pool and what they were doing?

As my exercise class got underway, the ripples of reflected light became more chaotic, as we thrashed around with our styrofoam “weights.” I thought how hard it is to detect a pattern when there are so many patterns going on all at once.

So much of what we take for granted makes sense when you think about it that way – society, culture, politics. Ripples intersecting – and the interference patterns they create.

Can you think of those 3D-looking shapes in the center as “objects” or are they just the effect of the concentric circles that make them up? I think culture is like one of those shapes, an interference pattern.

Interference patterns fascinate me. Back when I was a college art student, I got on an Op Art kick.

It was apparently fashionable in the 60s to decorate clothing and other items with distorted black and white checkerboard patterns. Most of it was eye-poppingly hard to look at, but the principle of it attracted me.

Especially the moire effect – the crazy patterns created when things like window screens and lace curtains intersect.

This was long before I had a computer, so all I had to work with were a compass, paper, pen and ink. My mother got annoyed over it. “We sent you to school to study art and you’re sitting around drawing circles?”

And distorted checkerboard art, which I decided was cooler.

Particle physics fascinates me. Muonium is a thing! Who knew? I at least try to follow news from the Large Hadron Collider. I know just enough to be dangerous, but I am familiar with the idea that a thing can be a wave or a particle depending on how you look at it. How strange.

It occurs to me lately that Western culture has maybe leaned a bit too hard on the particle side of things. Particles are like bricks. You can make things out of them. What would it feel like to see more of the world as waves?

Even a mountain is a kind of wave. Just an incredibly slow one. Usually. Icelanders can verify how fast and wavy “solid rock” can become. The crust of the earth floats on a sea of hot magma. You have to expect there are going to be ripples.

Cultures are like ripples, and ripples intersecting with other ripples. Sometimes, maybe most times, what you see as a defining pattern is an intersection of other patterns.

I think of a culture as concentric circles of influence. Art, music, movies, ideas about the world, how it works, how it should work, who’s good, who’s bad, what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s important, what isn’t.

There are dissonant ripples within. There are ripples from outside. The patterns get messy and chaotic like the lights on the wall when we began to splash around.

And sometimes they come together and form a new pattern, recognizable as an object. The ideal is to appreciate the beauty of that pattern in itself and not think you can or should pull the concentric circles apart.

I think Americans have been going through an identity crisis for quite a while now. What are we? People try to identify with one heritage or another, but it doesn’t quite capture it.

I’ve decided American culture is an interference pattern. We’re the shapes created when those circles intersect, not any of the constituent parts. I think that’s a better metaphor than melting pot. We’re not just this mushy stew. People abroad can tell we’re Americans.

They don’t recognize us as Europeans, Africans, Asians or what have you. We have an identity. It’s just not an easy to define identity. We’re like that light show on the wall at the pool. And I kinda like that.