Differentiating Her

I wonder so often how my wife knows what she knows, sees what she sees, does what she does, with such a compact worldview that can eclipse and compact mere difference with wrongness. Not only is individual human experience a progression from a baby's compact experience to mature adulthood and old age, but even the arc of human history has moved from compact early human civilizations to our more differentiated present civilization.

I myself have believed in the salvific power of scientistic differentiation. I grew up in a large family in a rather cluttered house, and I probably learned early on to identify the most important and essential things because only a few things could be wholly and completely mine. I honed my natural simplification impulse towards the essential and aimed like a laser to the heart of the matter, eliminating everything else in the way. Even today I've theorized the reason I like a good story while my wife likes a good biography is because non-fiction compacts disparate aspects into a holistic portrait while fiction creates a holistic picture to highlight a specific differentiated point.

Yet now not only do I wonder how well I have ever differentiated anything if in the process I have been missing some important things, because after all, as my wife points out, no one lives their life on a single differentiated point. We experience things compactly and later differentiate them, and while some people, such as I, find meaning in later attention to categories and labels at the expense of the compact holistic experience, other people actively ignore the differentiating impulse in order to maintain the present experiential meaning, such as my wife. And I'm in love with my wife, and a little in love with how she sees the world, how she knows the things I don’t know; and we've had more than a few laughs over my ironical and comical attempts to understand her better by trying to differentiate the essence of a holistic, compact experiential worldview.

Ultimately any symbol, all symbols no matter how compact or differentiated, can only be appraised by their effectiveness, their adequacy and accuracy to the task and experience at hand.