Understanding Is A Prize For Fools

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Once, at a professional get-together, we drank tea. I asked for a green one, but it was not there. I was offered to brew lemon balm. To which I joked that I would fall asleep and the company would lose me. A colleague was surprised: she did not know that Melissa made her sleepy. “I don’t have such a concept, so this herb doesn’t work on me like that,” she explained, which stunned me.

It turns out that we can only see what is part of our concept. Everything else is beyond our vision.

A concept (lat. Conceptio - understanding, a single idea, a leading thought) is a system of views that determines how we see, understand and explain various phenomena, objects or processes

We all live in a world of concepts. There is a universal set of them: from how the Cosmos is arranged to the point of view of an individual person, on the smallest issue. Concepts help us structure space, balance the chaos from which our life is born.

Imagine a very religious Christian who suddenly finds out that there is no God. Then this person's world will collapse. The values on which the believer relied will crumble like autumn leaves. A total hell will begin in his mind and life, panic will reign. This will continue until the disappeared notion of the structure of the world is replaced by a new, conceptually appropriate one.

Because the concept is soothing. When there is a lot of anxiety, the question is tormented: what is happening? The concept provides answers. In this way, she helps us, but only until she begins to replace a full-fledged life with its palette of various experiences: from rage, longing and sadness to joy and delight. Including anxiety.

Why do we need feelings?

Especially those that people call "negative." I know many who try to think and live "positively" without feelings "with a minus sign." Although, in fact, all the senses are controlled by one "switch", which works on "on and off". And if the opponents of anger turn it off, then they also exclude other experiences from their lives. Together with the ability to get angry, they lose the ability to rejoice. Their life turns into an emasculated process without leaps, turns, falls and ups. This can be a choice. Of course, such an existence is safer. But personally, I prefer a colorful world with bright happiness and the same obvious pain. At the same time, each feeling has its own purpose.

What would happen if life were without anxiety?

Imagine a mouse crawling serenely out of a burrow and calmly walking towards the smell of cheese. She does not look around and does not allow possible dangers. She is not worried about cats, people and mousetraps. But they are there, even if the mouse does not see them. And they want her dead. If the mouse manages to get to the food unharmed, then it may well die in the mousetrap where the cheese lies. And if the mouse was anxious, it would choose a safe time and place and take into account all possible threats.

Anxiety makes us alert, encourages us to stay alert in anticipation of all kinds of threats, be it hunger, overheating or frostbite, strangers, diseases, predators, fire or darkness. Through anxiety, we can avoid danger even before it becomes real. Anxiety develops society and drives progress. It was she who prompted us to make fire, create electric lighting and develop the latest technologies.

So the less we worry, the more we are in danger. And the more concepts we have in our life, the more vulnerable and less sensitive we are.

At the age of 7 - 10, the child has already formed the bulk of the concepts. These are simple, but important ideas about life and death, the structure of the world. And every year there are more concepts. This is neither good nor bad - this is how a person chooses the quality of life. You can prefer an accessible structure with clear ideas about the nature of things: how to build relationships with people, accurate knowledge and clear cause-and-effect relationships between phenomena. A clear life without risk, pain and change - it's real to choose. But it would not hurt to regulate the influence of concepts. To allow more experiences into life, more often to be impressed by new ones. Indeed, reality can be conceptually understood, or you can change yourself with its changes. These are different paths. As the American writer Luke Reinhard said: “Understanding is a prize for fools. It must be tried and experienced. Understanding the cause does not facilitate existence and does not change anything in it. It's just that the concept fixes life in an understandable, safe framework, makes it inflexible.

I know people who are confident that if they find the cause of their problem, be it a difficulty in a relationship, a symptom, or a series of repeated failures, it will disappear. In fact, it turns out that knowledge only relieves anxiety, calms for a while, like a sedative, like me - lemon balm tea. But pain, anxiety and worry return.

We often ask for ready-made answers. For example, many look for the causes of their ailments in Louise Hay's table or Dr. Sinelnikov's advice to calm down. They will find out that if joints hurt, then there is a lot of anger. Then you have to go dig a garden or bang pillows.

An understandable desire to cope with the disintegration of ideas leads to the fact that there is no room for freedom of choice, creativity and responsibility. The person finds himself in a dead end.

People are looking for something in the past to give meaning and justify what happens to them in the present. Remember the king from Schwartz's "Ordinary Miracle"?

He called himself a tyrant and despot, bullied the servants and put poison in the wine. At the same time, he blamed his great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, forefathers and foremothers, who behaved like pigs in life, for such behavior, and he is now clearing up their past.

If the king of Schwartz could fully experience "here and now", for example, his vulnerability, he would not have the need to turn to the past.

In fact, the past and the future are abstractions that arise from our fear of not coping with some kind of experience. Nothing except now exists, and all the stories about there and then are just attempts to structure your world, get rid of the anxiety of the present. Therefore, only a tiny part of life is based on experiences, while a large part of it is structured by the concept.

Have you ever wondered what concept you live in? This can be understood from your relationships with other people. How you treat other people is determined by the meaning you put into the relationship. Meaning is derived from the concept that drives you.

As a child, I was taught that men cannot be trusted, and they all want only one thing. A strong message from the people who matter to me - my parents - have been driving my relationships with men until recently.

How did this happen? When I met a guy interested in me, I immediately assessed him as a potential threat and behaved accordingly. I exhibited needles, rude, devalued. The poor guy didn't even get a chance to impress me. Had he turned out to be a disinterested person, not expecting “that very one” from me, I would have created a threatening situation myself. I would structure the space accordingly to make sure that men are dangerous. Because I know exactly how to deal with boors and extortionists, but with decent guys, alas - no.

In conclusion, I will say that it is simply difficult to live, because the human psyche is economical. It takes a lot of effort to experience anxiety, joy, attraction, pain, excitement, and other feelings the moment they appear. It's easier to refuse to feel and give meaning to what is happening, habitually squeeze life into an accessible concept. But let the world impress you. It will make life tastier.

In the end, it doesn't matter how lemon balm tea works. You can just enjoy its taste.