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The Art of Framing

It has lately occurred to me that I may have been using the wrong frame all these years. Heaven only knows how or when I acquired it; I may have been born wearing it, but I don’t remember anyone noticing as I was growing up. I mean I may not have won any popularity contests, but people who read a lot instead of trying out for the school team, seldom do, I suppose. I didn’t get many dates either, but I always put that down to being shy as opposed to never belonging to anything more prestigious than an after-hours vocabulary club.

But the wrong frame? Who knew? Frames, in case you’re confused, are the constellations of concepts, methods and assumptions that reflect our understanding of the world around us and regulate how we think and act.[i] Paradigms, in other words. At any rate, now that I know what I’ve been wrapped in all these years, I feel used somehow: ‘Once the framework is settled, it delimits the questions we can ask and the range of their possible answers.’

It’s almost as if my ‘confirmation bubble’ was turning against me when I didn’t even know I had one, let alone that it was watching. I mean, I seldom go on Social Media, so how could it know? It’s all a bit creepy if you ask me. But maybe it’s sort of like a shadow that I seldom notice as long as I’m doing what I think I should be doing: facing the light, in other words.

I have a friend Arvyd who lives there -not behind me, exactly, but watching me carefully while he considers my views. He’s almost like my auriga: in ancient Roman times, the auriga was the person charged with accompanying a victorious General on parade through the streets and whispering in his ear ‘Memento homo’ -you are only human. The difference being that I have seldom been victorious at anything important, and I don’t need reminding about it.

Still, there are the little things, the everyday things, that I tend to trip over. I acquired them quite innocently, I think. I mean it was never easy to gainsay my mother when dessert depended on whether or not I agreed with her view on things I didn’t really understand. Perhaps those things became so imbedded in my personality as I matured, that I thought of them as ‘givens’; I became quite adept at them, I suppose.

Reading was a source of wisdom for me; there are many things I will never be able to figure out on my own -things that others have already discovered- so why not learn about what they have already learned? It’s how I was taught to move through Life -not dependent, really, more… assisted. After all, it’s what universities and books are all about. It’s why my parents subscribed to the Reader’s Digest when I was young.

Arvy, though was raised differently; nobody in his family of farmers from Eastern Europe had ever felt the need for more education than the land on which they lived already offered them. “The answers are there,” he would tell me, pointing his finger around him whenever we walked through a field or wandered along a trail in the forest. “Sometimes, G, you just have to open your eyes and observe things. Listen to things…” His eyes would moisten as he looked around, unable to understand why I didn’t see and appreciate the same things as him.

I would usually shrug when he said things like that: silly things, about plants and animals actually knowing what they were doing. He had his world, and I had mine. Books weren’t, well, real in the same way as Nature, but they contained ideas that, quite honestly, I could never see or hear in a tree, or a blade of grass. Whatever Nature had taught us was far in the past when we were still open to it: which of them was good to eat, and which one could protect us from other things living in their world.

Arvy never used the word ‘agency’ -I doubt he even knew that the word could be applied to Nature- but he certainly attributed teleology to things I had never thought might possess it. “Take trees,” I remember him saying one day as we wandered along a trail deep in the woods. “They can’t move much, but they can often defend themselves against things that can. They can even signal their location to other animals or insects they hope will visit.”

I rolled my eyes and sent them tumbling onto his face.

“It’s the chemicals, they emit,” he added as a response to my unstated incredulity. “My father used to tell me about them when we went gather mushrooms in the forest. “And no, G,” he added when he heard me take a deep stertorous breath, “we can only smell of few of them…”

I tried not to seem contemptuous of his wisdom -he was a dear friend of mine- but I couldn’t resist asking him why, if trees were so adept at deterring or summoning some things, they nevertheless fell prey to others -the chainsaws of loggers, for example. They couldn’t prevent their own destruction…

He stopped in his tracks and stared at me for a moment. “They can’t??” he almost yelled at me using double question marks for the first time since I’ve known him. “Why can’t we manage to prevent wars, G? Why can’t we prevent storms?” He shook his head sadly. “I mean how smart are we?”

He had a point, I realized, and sighed in response. It’s interesting how we are so wrapped in our self-promoted wisdom that we fail to see what should be immediately obvious if we even glanced in another direction. Sometimes we really can’t see the forest for the trees.

His eyes twinkled at my sigh and then he shrugged, as if his parents had long ago taught him to expect opposition to paradigm shifts in their newly adopted country. “We eat and get eaten, we use what we can, and adapt when we can’t; it’s when we become greedy that things start to unravel. It’s when we forget the value of what we already have, that problems arise.”

He paused to take a deep breath.

“I think that all that Nature requires, is gratitude for what it provides, and the same respect we would show for members of our family.”

The smile suddenly faded from his lips and he shook his head slowly. “Without Family, we are really alone, G…”

Without friends we are alone as well, I thought as I looked at Arvyd with fresh eyes.

[i]https://aeon.co/essays/the-realist-vs-the-pragmatist-view-of-epistemology

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