When I can’t quite describe something I tend to say it’s like trying to define the word the. Everyone uses it, and everyone knows what it means when they use it, but a sterile definition of what makes a specific article important is as useful as a screen door on a submarine. It’s in the usage that it derives its real meaning.
That happens often too, these requests for definitions. We have to define everything these days. Define our relationships. Define our likes and dislikes. Define everything that has to do with everything, and also everything that has to do with nothing. It’s the way of the world, I guess, with no one taking anything at face value anymore. Perhaps face value doesn’t exist because it’s been overwritten so many times in so many ways.
It’s what I call fatigue syndrome. It’s like experiencing gravity. We have seen its effects a million times, but if we’ve never experienced anything but gravity it loses the awesome power that it should always contain. Because gravity is an awesome thing, a dynamic construct that is enormous, but we’re so used to it that we don’t recognize it for what it truly is.
So we can define it. We can talk about the enormous pull. We can do everything to understand the phenomena, but we are just scientists in a lab, not out in the wild getting our hands dirty in zero-gravity. We are simply human beings who are doing our best to give others what they want, what they request from us, but we have never defied gravity. We have never taken control of our situations and transcended them. We don’t get it.
We throw around these words like they’re salt on icy roads, but we never truly analyze them, words like love and hate and depression and want and need. Sure, we often tell people that we love them, but have we ever really broken down our feelings and emotions to uncover what that truly means? We say we hate things, but have we really thought about it in concrete terms, not just abstract concepts?
Because everything has a concrete counterpart. The word the can be clearly defined by its usage, after all. So when we say we want or need another person, or a physical thing, what do we really mean? Do we need it like gravity? Have we just said the words so long that they’ve lost all meaning? I can’t help but think it’s this reality that haunts us every day without us even knowing it. It bleeds into everything that we do and say.
So we should imagine what it would be like to defy gravity, to step out into space and not come back down to earth, to soar like we never have before, because only by doing this can we truly understand how precious what we have is, how special and unique. When we love we can love with our whole hearts instead of just because we are expected to love. When we hate we can do it for solid reasons, not just because everyone else might hate.
Only when the abstract becomes concrete can we truly define and accept it for what it can’t help being.
Sam
Sam's Online Journal 