Sometimes it’s enough to know that something happened. We deal with it and move on. When it isn’t enough, or we can’t deal with it, we get out the social microscope. We trace connections, and draw lines between the experiential dots until we see a picture that tells us the almighty Why.
I blame Freud. He started explaining all those deeply buried reasons why we particularly like asparagus or don’t like clowns. He kicked “Honor thy father and mother” up a notch --- and extra credit to whoever knows which commandment that is, because I don’t. My point is that he’s the one who started the tsunami of explanation.
‘“Why” doesn’t matter.’ That’s a favorite saying of mine, whenever someone starts picking apart a situation rather than deal with it. So a guy cut you off in traffic. You will never know what he’s compensating for, or if he’s in a humanitarian hurry to save a life. Make fun of his bumper stickers and get over it.
Whatever happened to good, old-fashioned repression, suppression and denial? They may not be popular, but they sure were efficient.
There was a moth trapped inside my window all afternoon. Just now, I caught it in an empty glass and set it free in the bushes outside. If it had been a fly, I would have killed it on sight, but it wasn’t, it was pretty. That may be why I set it free, or I could have been anthropomorphizing, or maybe when it flapped its wings something happened in Iowa. Maybe I needed a closing paragraph. “Why” doesn’t matter. It happened, and that’s enough.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Interesting. This is a very intriguing topic to tackle. If we tried to analyze absolutely everything we see, we would fail (and go mad in the process).
I've been pondering my position on this as well.
Don't you think that it's important to analyze "why" occasionally, especially when it comes to our own actions?
By asking "why", I've learned that we can break vicious cycles that might lead us to become overweight, impoverished, weak, etc.
On the other hand, going with the flow will always take you wherever the path of least resistance leads.
Thanks for reading, and for taking me so seriously. We can both be right. Significant issues merit analysis, trivia and ephemera don't. Gauge it by consequence, or by permanence, it doesn't matter. There's still a spectum of relevance (or lack thereof) that is often ignored.
Post a Comment