All that lives, or is just matter on this earth, has to live according to natures rules. We all are slaves to friction, erosion, gravity and the sun that puts most of this in motion. Within these boundaries it seems to be a free for all, we see some order in for instance the erosion of a rock formation, but only when we focus on a part of all that is the cause of this erosion.
Wind and water take the softer parts of the rock in their own fashion. We know about the water, and the wind, and rain, we can go several steps deeper when trying to explain what the reason is that rocks erode. My point is that a four year old kid that starts asking questions like: why? That even the smartest person alive can maybe answer 30 times before they have to concede. We are not capable of understanding it all, the closest we get is imagining it in rough strokes and bold colors.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Albert Einstein
You can replace the rock example from above with history. History is also chaos when you try to understand it all, only when you zoom in, you will get closer to an understanding. But if you don’t zoom in to close, and try to look at that part of history trough the lens of “bolder strokes and many colors” then you will see some highlights, and the more important figures morph into easier to understand caricatures.
A person like Ronald Reagan or Michael Jackson can be described in a book with a thousand pages but I am sure that all of you can do it in three sentences or less. When you make such a bold caricature of a person, or situation, then you (should)know that you are maybe right from your limited perspective, but at the same time totally wrong. To understand Ronald Reagan better you should read a book about him, maybe several, and for good measure, study the eighties. If you have done that, then you can form a more accurate opinion. We are capable of understanding the smaller details in more details, only if you want to understand the big picture you should use your imagination. Don’t use your imagination, when your neighbor so noisy, ask it.
We all share this problem of our nature. It is all so hard to understand, so we adopted our look at reality in such a way, that we are most of the time satisfied with the (almost literal) picture we have of the situation. Look at all the wars that are fought over the years, most of them started because of a misunderstanding of the situation. Remember the Iraq war from 15 years ago, no one was in control there, we understood what was “eroding” our will not to fight, but we didn’t look much further than that.
Inspired by Day 1532
Nochrisis 