Relatively Simple

We went to a Thai restaurant today. There is this person in our team who always goes for the spiciest version of the food. Believe me, this is the kind of spiciness that you should really avoid... This particular place even has a scale from Thai Hot to 1 star Thai Hot all the way to 5 star. This friend of mine was trying out the 5 star. In comparison, I was trying the mild version and was sweating all over... The idea of tomorrow morning is already haunting me..:)..Anyway, I was wondering what it would be like for him to taste my mild fried rice. Would it be spicy for him or just plain bland? There are often times when I have wondered why the quest for something, more often than not, changes our baseline definition of our current state. For example, when someone is poor, they want to become rich. But, when they get richer, they still want to get richer, or rather, they still think they are still poorer. Expressing one's thoughts is another example. The more effort one puts into understanding something that looks complex, their perception of simplicity changes.

I was reading up on Relativity by Einstein. For the person he is, he considers certain elements of his thought process to be very simple and rudimentary, so that even a caveman could understand it..:) But, my understanding, or should I say, my perception of what he is trying to say baffles me. If not anything, the only thing that I learnt from this book is that the perception of things change dynamically. In other words, nothing changes in absolute domains. It is just our perception. Think about it, when we get richer, our definition of richness changes. As we get faster, our notion of time and distance changes. As we learn something that is complex, our definition of simple changes. Complexity becomes the new simplicity. In Einstein's words, if Gulliver had shrunk or expanded when he entered Lilliput or Brobdingnag according to the scale of its inhabitants, he wouldnt have noticed anything different. In real life, interestingly, thats what happens all the time. Our scope and vision transforms itself based on what we know at that point of time. Though this might sound like a "simple" statement, this is one of the fundamentals which was key in formulating the principles of relativity.