Breaking the frame

Categorizing people is only natural.  We decide that this one could be a friend and that one could be a lover, and the one over there should be avoided, because he’s toxic.  We list in our heads the attributes that we like, and then tick items off the list when we meet someone.  But it’s the ones who don’t fold neatly into our boxes who intrigue us.  We can’t keep our minds off of them.  Those are the ones we become obsessed with, or fall in love with, become elated and then crushed by.

We also categorize things, situations, life events, and indeed even reality itself.  On a bad day, the world can appear filled up with demons, and on a good day, with angels.  We frame the way it should all be interpreted.  But these frames are illusions.  Any frame misses something real, and the deeper we fall into a frame, the more inflated and distorted become its edges, until they are ready to devour us.  This is our shadow world -- the world that lies outside of our frames -- and if we are too rigid, the shadow will eat us.  Look no further than Ted Haggard.

Our frames go way beyond where we think they do.  We see, we feel, we hear and touch and smell and intuit things, but are those things actually real?  Usually not.  We experience a physical presence to objects like wooden tables, but it turns out that at the atomic level, tables are mostly empty space, and it’s electrical force fields that make them seem solid.  Quantum mechanics makes us wonder if any of the components of the table have independent existences at all.  Human consciousness seems to be actually a grand experiment in framing, because the reality we experience is certainly not much like the reality which actually exists.  Our animal past has forced us to categorize.  We are evolutionarily tuned for survival, and we must understand our surroundings in a way that allows us to wield it, whether or not that understanding is accurate.  

If our frames are too feeble, we’ll wash about in the frames of others, like plankton.  If our frames are too strong, they’ll force the world to our image, and we’ll be blind to the world’s actual shape.  What we do not think a person capable of, if our frame is strong enough, he actually won’t do, and what we decide a person ought to do, he or she will.  The stronger our frames the less we are ever surprised, because our world is so tightly controlled.  

But ever so occasionally, an encounter can slap the frames away from our eyes.  For that split second, we can see the world naked.  These are the events that have the power to change us.  We are left shocked, lost, and with edges of frames jutting everywhere, exposing all of the monsters that were hidden.  We are suddenly aware of our frames, and of the fact that they’re frames, and of all the truths that, by operating within them, we’ve been missing.  We see our old world as a dance of illusions.  And we experience a choice -- to fit the frames back upon ourselves ever tighter, or to transcend them.  


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