I gave myself a few days off from writing. It started first with, “I don’t feel like writing today”, largely because of the summary issue which interferes with some of my plans and needs to be addressed1.
It’s easy to lose inertia. All you have to do is stop moving, which is easy enough because life’s frictional forces will happily put you to rest.
Then I got involved in some ‘debates’ regarding different things in a group, and saw pretty clearly how there are two main sides and they are so busy ‘debating’ that they seem to have forgotten, or never realized, that the frame of a debate or discussion is easily expanded.
People only seem to know how to make frames smaller. Maybe those are their strong muscles constricting discussion into increasingly small areas, and yet what we have found in the world is that the seemingly minuscule almost always has a broader context.
The frames are generally handed to us by others. Republicans versus Democrats, coffee versus tea, cats versus dogs, The Beatles versus Elvis, and so on. You’re expected to have a side, and if you don’t, you’re graded on scales of either.
I like big frames. When I don’t understand things, or when I don’t have an answer or more importantly better questions, I wander. Or wonder. The two words are wonderfully interchangeable, with one exception being this sentence.
Why do we instinctively draw smaller frames when trying to understand something, or discuss something? Is it our eyes, allowing us to attenuate light so the grey matter encased in our skills can focus? Why can’t we focus more broadly?
These, I think, are better questions, and something I’m having fun exploring.
Sometimes, you need to wander the shifting landscape around you to discover where you are.
When’s the last time you orbited your position?
- I have developed a few strategies on this, which are on the back burner now and which I’ll share maybe this week. They are benign in nature, and publishing it might help stem the tide. ↩︎
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