Context is Everything: Part One

By: Kelly

Disclaimer: My next couple of posts are going to look more like chapters out of a Harry Potter book than short, snappy blog posts but bear with me because I have to get through some fundamental points in order to expand later on. Unless you have a strong foundation your argument holds no ground. So even though they're long, I promise that they are mind-blowing and interesting ;)

A good 90% or more of every relationship is based on thin air. A tiny core of substance is shrouded in layer after layer of obscure, filmy material that can vanish in a second. What is this material? It’s whatever you make of it- expectations, hopes, desires, fears, assumptions. As you get to know a person, many times you are adding another lie for every truth you discover. This is because when we find out details about a person’s life, we are learning just as much about ourselves as we are about them. The more we learn about ourselves, the farther we get away from the person we intended to get to know, if our selfish natures are left unchecked. Every single person’s goal in life is self-motivated. Even the most altruistic, charitable person is essentially self-centered. Sure, they say they do what they do to help others, but if helping others didn’t give them a sense of fulfillment, pride, or gratification, they would not do it. Even the person who sacrifices himself for his wife or daughter is acting in self interest. He might think he is doing it to “save them” in that moment, but essentially he does it because he doesn’t think a life without them would be worth living. He would rather be dead than live without them. Therefore, he is doing what is best for him.This is not a bad thing- it’s a means of survival. We will always do what we think is right for us. So when we learn about another person, we are always internally asking ourselves, “What does this mean for me?” The answer to that question becomes the material I mentioned at the beginning. The answer becomes the context by which we view everything and everyone. The context is our personal bias.

How do I know the vast majority of every relationship is made up of context? Anyone who recognizes the truth that “you can never love someone as much as you can miss them” should undertand what I mean by context. This is because we build up our emotions and the way we view a person to a point where they can never reach out expectations. We see people the way we want to see them rather than how they truly are. Sure, we can try to be nonjudgmental and unbiased but we will never fully succeed. No matter how much you want to understand someone, there will always be a layer separating you from that person because of the differences each of you has acquired as a direct result of your experiences and mindsets. No one ever truly understands another person’s point of view unless they share it in its entirety. It’s like John Green said- “Isn’t it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.” If we did completely understand a person’s thought process in the exhaustive detail in which it was originally created in their head, we would never say that that person is wrong. We would think the same exact way they do. What is true for one person is false for another. That is context.

Context in and of itself is not a bad thing. It’s necessary and it is what makes us individuals and what makes us human. Animals don’t have it and that is why they all think in one instinctual mindset. Life isn’t about breaking loose from context; it’s about building it but also recognizing its severe limitations. We’re all individual artists sculpting our own creations in the form of our mindsets- the treasure troves of knowledge, experience, stories, and personal truths that lie in a mass of matter inside our heads. The danger comes in to play when we see context as reality. Context is a beautiful thing- it’s what allows two people to look at a painting and see completely different scenes with completely different meanings- but unless we recognize that essentially, it is just a painting- a mixture of color, texture, and chemicals- we run a risk. We run a risk of becoming so immersed in our own vision that we fail to see anything else.

So since we should not and cannot get rid of context, we have to learn to work with it, to craft it in such a way that it won’t consume us. We have to tailor it to best fit our needs but also to ensure that we always have our eyes focused on the bigger picture. Failing to see the big picture is the most common and most disastrous mistake people make when it comes to relationships. Give me an example of any split or rejection, and nine times out of ten I can find the source of the problem in context. Either the person went into the relationship by being blinded by their bias and expectations (i.e. they fell in love with love or with their definition of a person rather than the actual person- more on this next post), or halfway through a relationship, they lost their way and forgot to focus on the big picture (i.e. they stopped seeing things from their partner's point of view).

My government teacher once shared an analogy with our class that has always stuck with me. He said that, if you compare life to a football game, most people spend their time in the bleachers. They can only see the game up close- they scream their heads off for the players on the field and can only root for one team because they are so immersed in the emotional rush of the moment. The truly wise people in life however, view the game from the blimp. They can see the big picture. They see the game in its entirety in which all of the people are just pinpricks of color on a larger, more beautiful stage. The people in the bleachers are consumed by their context while the people in the blimp have learned to work with theirs. That's why so many relationship experts harp on communication- in a relationship, you always have to try to view it from the other person's eyes rather than your own so you can anticipate their needs.