I suppose much of the credit goes to the top-down planning that we're all pretty certain happened in the months before this Camp. Those running this great ongoing experiment knew enough to take the right risk with this particular collection of oddballs and characters such that we would intuitively see the opportunity for transformative energy and seize it without concern or regret. They knew, by something they read or something we said, that we each were sparks in search of a wildfire, and calculated just the right kindling to start the chain reaction.

To illustrate that I'm not just blowing smoke, I'll point out a happy coincidence that our benevolent overlords were delighted to cause. I didn't introduce the word "fractal" to the common tongue here, but I'm delighted that someone lit upon the word within my hearing. The fact that each of our learning circles seems to exhibit the same degree of skill/knowledge symmetry found in our cohorts which just happens to be reflected in the greater Cadre is about as accidental as a Jackson Pollock. Bringing up Distributed Cognition on the first day of our first class and thereby implicitly tickling our brains with the question of the boundaries of cognition was, as they say, just icing.

I don't mean to direct too much of the credit away from us as individuals and as a group. Our program co-directors deserve their due. They created the precisely tuned chaos, but we put our hands to the wheel and shaped an order that works better for us than even they seem to have expected. I still wouldn't be surprised if things fall apart a bit before the end of Camp... I would be utterly shocked if we didn't pull it all back together with the unflappable cohesion that we've all seen manifest with every obstacle we pass.