stand back

This week I was reading about the history of Western thought and then I was looking at nytimes.com (which, certainly, plays its own small role in the history of Western thought) and something intrigued me about their "most blogged" list of articles. Not about the list itself, but about the fact that it exists and how I was sure there was a very telling sociological / anthropological study in there somewhere - about the type of people who read the New York Times online and the particular articles they are interested in. For example, the "most blogged" story today was about high gas prices, which could be interpreted to mean that most online readers either own cars or rely heavily on crude oil... or are environmentalists encouraging their readers to be independent of oil, or... Whatever it means, I was bemused by the way my brain instantly tried to make sense of the data presented. It was how I was trained in college - look at all the facts and information and numbers, and make it make sense!

I thought about how when we are young, there is a point at which the world becomes overwhelming. When we travel for the first time, for example, we begin to understand ourselves as part of a larger world, and we realize how very much we do not know about who we are. So we try to make sense of it all. I used to think it was funny, in college, the way we existed in our removed little microchasm - discussing our lives in theoretical terms that ended in "-ization", spending hours on a math problem without writing down a single number. My roommate once said, we all have our own models for understanding the world, and everything we see, hear, experience, has to fit into that model somewhere. We choose a mode of interpretation - our college major, supposedly - and this is how we process the overwhelming amount of information to which we are exposed.

Lately, I have begun to question this codification in favor of a new philosophy: observation and acceptance. I simply find the world fascinating as it is. Perhaps it is because I have not been able to fully commit my mind to any one methodology; and springtime and a recent bit of good fortune have inspired me to see everything as beautiful and unique and worthwhile. If I could step to the podium for a moment, I would say this: it is time to step back. Stop trying to force things to make sense, just listen, watch, absorb. It takes concentration and effort, but I believe it will bring peace to this Western world.