A THIN SLICE

Viewing the world (or anything else for that matter) through a straw is a metaphor for narrow minded, tunnel vision. Most of what I understand and believe has been clarified largely by metaphors, like hooks on the wall where I hang my many hats. The straw metaphor is such a visual thing that I can’t resist it. It pops up on my radar concerning everything of moral import, especially government and religion. 

It’s un-human to challenge your own beliefs or question what feels right; our brain must surely be able to multitask, unscrambling moral dilemmas in a way that keeps us above the fray. As much as we like to believe that we are multitaskers, we can only concentrate on one thing at a time. What feels like multitasking is simply, rapid-fire, channel surfing. Technology allows us to split images on our monitors but they can’t run different movies on the same frequency. Neither does the brain consciously process different ideas simultaneously; it’s a one channel brain. 

Back when Garrison Keillor was a respected writer and radio personality, before his misogynist indiscretions caught up with him, he wrote and I paraphrase; “I always feared I would live a normal life and I wanted a spectacular life. But what we get is less than spectacular and that’s good enough.” That idea, “it’s what we get” rings true when it funnels into my brain. Boot-strap logic sounds good and we have to live as if it were true but in the end, we get what life puts in front of us. We seem to have some say in how we react but that’s a proposition for another day. Evolution gave us all a straw to peer through. On our best day, that’s what we get. We want to believe we get a sweeping panorama of everything that is important but the world we experience is too big, too complex for even our big brains. We have to chew on little morsels, one by one, and there just isn't enough time. The text of one’s experience and the meaning they assign to it is simply too small, too incomplete to address a reality that is incomprehensible. Reality is like Keillor’s revelation, too much to hope for but that’s alright. All we get is a thin slice but it feels like we ate the whole thing. Each person’s less than spectacular experience is unique and we don’t get the luxury of knowing for sure how it came to pass or what it means. We must leave the cause/effect analysis to historians who are yet to be born. 

If the view through my straw overlaps with yours, then we have that in common. If we pan or tilt in concert like cameras on a movie set, we might vote the same ticket and express our spirituality in the same way. But if you tilt while I pan, we’ll never be on the same page. Whichever culture we imprint, transcending from rookie to veteran, that’s the one we’re stuck with. Pushing back is possible but painfully difficult, extremely unlikely; unless what seems to work for everybody else simply doesn’t work for you. Rejecting our tribe and its traditions would make us humanity’s ugly ducklings. Still, even if we reverse everything, the old-us is indestructible, idling in a neutral gear, ready to take over at a moment’s notice like a bad tattoo that you keep covered but can never erase. 

At quick glance, I count at least 15 metaphors so far; they embellish an entangled reality by providing simple if not child like imagery. That’s how I assimilate my ‘Through a straw’ life. Tribal protocol may require us to compete but we don’t have to win, just act as if we did; not bad for high functioning monkeys.