Particulars and Abstractions.

I live between particulars and abstractions.

One the one hand, I keep doing the things I do to maintain the life I have. I get up and go to work. I do my job, come home, be with my family, pick up toys and put away clothes and pay bills and hang the frog shaped toy-basket in the shower that keeps falling off the wall because the tape has lost its stickyness.

On the other hand, I try to imagine nothingness, and cannot. I cannot conceive of nothingness. Beacuse even the darkest, blackest matter-free vacuum must be somewhere, some place. My mind cannot escape the boundaries of space. Even God must be somewhere. And how can God have no origin, no beginning? How can anything always just be? How can the vast expanses of the universe exist with no boundary, no starting point, but just exist? And anyway what are we doing here, going to and fro like ants who think their purpose is divined but who aren't sure that they're not just one of a type, a soldier, or a worker, or a queen? Some of us are even watching ants. Ants watching ants. Our colony is bigger, we think, but it's on the same dirt. And how can at one time children be starving in the Congo because drug runners killed their parents while wealthy executives play tennis while their wives drink mimosas while advertisers spend millions for 30 seconds of your attention to try and get you to buy a drink while captives of the sex trade suffer horrible fates and I do nothing?

These are not really abstractions. They are particulars, but I can only imagine them. I suppose I could travel to the Congo, and then my particulars would be my abstractions.

Life is so funny because we live in little worlds in a big world, and somehow we find a way to keep our little worlds intact, sometimes even sealed, despite the pressures and the noise of the big world around us. We compartmentalize our existence, each compartment protected from what's in the next one, in case they're incompatible. We can buy energy saving light bulbs and drive SUVs. We can wear sweatshop brands and give to world hunger charities. We can eat organic food, and way too much of it, until we are organically fat. No hormones though. We can go to church on Sunday and hate everyone on Monday. We can live undisturbed, unshaken by reality in its entirety, as long our abstractions don't become our particulars.

And sometimes, even when they do, we can shake them off, slowly starving them of the attention they need to survive, like a teen who comes home from a mission trip, witness-happy, and talks about the dirt streets and the poverty and oh, the poverty, until surely but slowly their old particulars creep back in and replace the new ones, until they forget about the pact they made with their fellow missionaries back in Guatemala to "always be changed from this."

We are not forced to see the world through a wide-aperture lense, where only objects in the foreground are focused. We choose the depth with which we look at life. We may see a little, or a great deal. What we do about what we see--and what we don't do--this is who we are.

"For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

-William Blake

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