Rediscovering The Obvious

In my rearrangement of how I view the world I've come to a lot of realizations. Some of them sound like trite cliché, because they have become so. The thing is, the surface of something may seem simple, but the application is both far-reaching and complex. The whole "still waters run deep" thing, to use yet another cliché. Not that the principle itself is all that surprising: many years ago I discovered that the fewer rules a thing has, the more complexity it is afforded in practice. Generally speaking, that is. Go has almost no rules but vast opportunity for novel play. Dungeons & Dragons is so simple at its core that the ramifications spawned endless books discussing and codifying it into "optional" rules for easier use. The 10 Commandments were too obvious and broad in application, requiring hundreds of little rules afterward to explain them. Likewise the U.S. Constitution, though instead of hundreds we now have millions.

So it's not much of a stretch to figure that even someone of introspective nature would find pivotal changes in point of view to be represented in long-established proverbs, and some surprise in how far-reaching they are.