465. Uncomfortable Abstractions

When we hear a story about a horrible experience, we want to know exactly what happened and why. Our desire to know is only partly driven by curiosity. We are much more worried that what happened might also happen to us. We want the details to show us that we will never find ourselves in the same situation.

But if the story we are told lacks any detail that would allow us to separate ourselves from it then our concern persists. The story seems to impose itself on us with no way to escape. Seeking comfort, perhaps we tell ourselves that it is just a story, that it only happened once, or that it is unlikely to happen again.

This problem arises whenever we are confronted by an abstraction that has implications for our own lives. It might take the form of a story or it might be an artwork of another kind. An abstraction is too big and too general, and it seems to engulf us regardless of our efforts to distance ourselves. Our last hope is to somehow defeat it through argument, to show that it cannot possibly apply to us and therefore we are safe.

We do not want to acknowledge that the abstraction might include us, that it might say something about our lives and the choices we are making. We feel it could take something precious from us, that we might lose some of our ability to get what we want or to defend our beliefs. We would be forced to adapt to the requirements of the abstraction and we desperately do not want to change.

So we fight against the abstraction instead of trying to understand it. We do everything we can to ignore it, which only hampers the growth of our awareness and perpetuates our own suffering. We close our eyes to reality, keeping ourselves stuck in a harmful and unnecessarily painful form of life, when we could instead become something more.