From Chapter 3:
"My friends, what’s important in life isn’t if you dislike something or even if you like it. What matters, is what it is, and if you honestly try, that’s a question you’ll have a tough time answering because there are COUNTLESS INTERPRETATIONS for everything in this world.
Here, have a cup.
Let’s say you had a cup, a teacup, let’s say, and you smashed it on the ground into five pieces. Now you have to ask yourself, “Is that a broken teacup, or just five whole pieces of a teacup?”
And I know what you’re thinking. “Whole pieces? Connor, there’s no such thing as a whole piece.” Ah! But imagine this: Now you take one of those pieces and smash it into five more! You have to ask even more questions. “Is this nine whole pieces of a teacup? Four whole pieces of a teacup and one broken piece? Or is it just, a broken, tea cup?” You take things apart twice, and suddenly your whole world is flipped upside down. Can a piece be whole? If it can... what is a "complete" item, and what's an incomplete one? When are things actually WHOLE, and when are they truly BROKEN? When broken twice, are smaller pieces... "pieces", or does size not actually matter? Are they still "a whole piece"? Look above. Read again, and tell me if you can answer down in the comments.
I'll be honest, I don't think that you can answer this. I don't think there is an answer. This could be why people don’t actually look into things objectively all day long. If they did, it might melt their brains, haha.
You can make anything, or any thought, seem complex, or incomplete, by breaking it apart enough, like a teacup being broken down into its atoms and beyond. The only question is if you can place your smaller concepts back together again, in the correct forms that are a larger idea and the newer, more expansive, and more progressive, concepts that go with it. Can you take all of those atoms, and somehow, against all odds, place them all back, piece by piece, until it forms the teacup again? Or is a teacup just too complex of a subject for you? It's true. Even the simple things can be made complex, but...
Alas, a teacup isn’t whole either; it’s tableware, for the dining room, which is a room on your first floor, which is one of, let’s say, 2 floors. Then there’s your yard, and your driveway, and the neighbor’s yard, the neighbor after that, and the town, and the county, and the state, and on and on and on, to the edge of the universe, where things may stop, or perhaps things exist outside of our reality, other dimensions, let’s say, expanding outward and onward, infinitely and forever, but at the very least, beyond that, is the unknown, and who knows how expansive and infinite that is. Yet, in the end, the teacup is still a part of it all, a single piece of everything. Even after all this zooming out, it's still there. You see? It’s simple. It's a very tiny, little teacup… Or is it something more complex than that?
Nothing is truly whole, and nothing is truly broken (Cite "Sanctuary" by Utada Hikari). None of your thoughts have actually been completed, as you still have more to learn and to add to what you know now. Yet, all of them have been completed, as they function exactly as their role demands. The key fact here, is that these roles will change, and with them, the definition of a "complete" thought, and the definition of an "incomplete" one, will change also. It all depends on how greedy you are, and how far you're willing to go, in the name of "completion". Your journey will always end when you tell it to. All you have to do, is stop trying... to grow. All words have 1 meaning, and yet... they all have several, and yet... they all have none. You cannot name something that exists in infinite phases. No definition could encapsulate all of that. There is no true name for an item that is both always complete and yet never will be.
And all items are both of these things. All of them.
Tiny yet big. Large yet small. It's simply complex, and yet complexingly simple.
But at the end of the day, all you need to know is this:
