Context - in simplified terms - means that every memory or experience and piece of knowledge, or intuition, or understanding, or information, whether personal or public, is fair game for my brain to use, analyze, and compare/contrast or cross-reference.
This even more simply means that anything that happens I can compare to something else and (because of who I am, personally) relive every experience and emotion and strategy/outcome that came from a prior event to now.
Therefore context is a very dangerous strength to have when you know a lot of things...
Sometimes I wish I didn't know so much. I also wish sometimes I wasn't made the way I am or hadn't experienced what I have.
But then I wouldn't be me.
The great thing about context is that I don't have to experience something personally to empathize. The bad thing is when the experience is mine and when it comes around full circle. When that happens I am trapped by the very real pains and hurts once known deeply.
Still, context is one of my strengths. It helps me find solutions to problems. It helps me remember the truths to hold onto in troubled times. It helps me understand people and situations I have no direct understanding of otherwise. Context is a part of me.
"Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabits."
~Frederick Buechner
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