It was school holiday time in Dunedin this week, and the young seeped from the city's pores, streamed into town and clogged the streets with their youth. Some hung out in the Octagon, while others considered the nature of nonexistence and chaos theory. In his column, David Loughrey took a hard look at their behaviour.
It is never too early for the young and very young to learn about the prevailing cosmological model for the early development of the universe.
Nor, for that matter, for them to spend some time wondering at the problem of existence - this ambiguous, fleeting and dream-like existence with which we blindly struggle.
It is never too early to consider the matter of chaos theory.
Now is the time for reflection on all such things, for Dunedin's young are labouring under the existential angst brought on by the school holidays.
The young were everywhere this week, swimming into town and getting caught up in the eddies of footpaths and streets.
They were holding hands in George St with their dads, who had taken time off work just for that simple pleasure.
They were driving in cars with their mums at times of day you don't usually see them.
They were clogging city shops, then walking out with badminton sets under their arms.
They were wandering the streets in groups of three: one group eating food and ambling; another sitting in the Octagon wearing caps, practising looking hard.
They were jumping off the diving board at Moana Pool and squealing.
Some jiggled and shuffled in their seats, exhibited awe and fascination at the behaviour of adults; they made faces, they populated normally quiet places and made them noisy.
Some were not doing what they were told, and others were doing what they had been told not to do.
None knew the rule all adults know - it is important to look busy, or at least gainfully occupied, lest people think poorly of you.
Instead, the young wandered and leaned nonchalantly on things, and exhibited idleness and inertia.
They probably missed evidence of cosmic microwave background the more observant of them might have picked up on, were they concentrating properly.
If they had looked up, they may have noted the expansion of the universe, and that may have led them to wonder about the beginning of all things.
If they had reflected on ancient creation myths they had heard, they may have wondered at their apparent similarity to the creation theories of modern science.
That's what they were doing at the Otago Museum.
At the museum, the young were being introduced to unknowable concepts, and sent on zen-like journeys of the mind, well before dinner time.
''Can you imagine what nothingness looked like?'' they were asked.
''Imagine what the beginning of the universe looked like.
''There is no wrong answer.''
The school holiday programme at the museum has a focus on chaos.
As all adults know, chaos theory suggests small differences in initial conditions yield widely diverging outcomes for dynamic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general.
Despite the small differences in initial conditions for the children who attended, at the 1.30pm session on Wednesday, the young were pleasantly orderly.
They sat quietly and heard about ancient creation stories.
They heard how Greek mythology begins with chaos, a sort of yawning nothingness.
The Maori creation story begins with darkness and nothingness, out of which Ranginui, the sky father, and Papatuanuku, the earth mother, emerge, forcing apart the heavens and the earth.
And the big bang theory suggests a universe denser and hotter in the past, and a time all matter in the universe was contained in a single point, before sort of exploding, or something.
It is hard to imagine what any of that looked like, even if there was no wrong answer.
But the bright children at the museum did not let that hinder their creativity.
They knew about intense concentration.
They were Dunedin children - you could see it written all across their little faces.
They were asked to decorate their own celestial vessel - in the form of a white mug - and they got to it.
They came up with designs from rays of light to strange wobbly lines, from tight, intense designs to expansive decorations, from the simplest of simple to the most convoluted of the complex.
And, perhaps they began to understand something of the strange nature of things.
