Bitter Grace

On getting stuck.

In the course of learning to think in increasingly abstract ways, eventually people start getting stuck. For a while. Maybe forever, depending certainly on whether they/we persist, and maybe on other things.

I remember quite vividly my first undergraduate year, in which I could perfectly follow arguments on reading history based on the fact that we were reading documents, not ingesting unmediated reality. But I also remember working to speak such an analysis, and losing track of where I was headed. I think it was just too much work, and I shut down. I persisted, and before long could make those sorts of arguments.

Chun Woo is still working on using passes and bodywork to reshape the geography of the ice, in hockey, and to make choices that are framed on those large lines rather than more tactically. Sometimes, it clicks, and he looks like WHOA! and feels it, too. But it goes away.

I remember how hard it was to get the flavour of epsilon-delta proofs in real analysis-- I think more narrative would have helped-- and how I kept trying, and kept trying. It really wasn't until a year later when I was using real analysis in math Econ that I got it.

This is why, in academe, in many disciplines, material is taught at intro, intermediate, maybe advanced undergrad, basic grad, and advanced grad levels. Abstractness of the view is courted.

But in US culture by and large people don't understand much about learning, except grades.

And getting stuck is frustrating. No lie. It just is. It's frustrating when you just can't get the modes being used by someone you're trying to communicate with, and it's frustrating when you have some idea how people are working but you keep losing your grip, and it's frustrating when you can understand how people are working but you can't quite do it yourself yet.

The way to deal with that is persistence, approaching again, approaching from another angle, getting help doing so, all without concern for public face.

Things that are antithetical to US culture right now, for anyone over the age of about three.

(Ah, child mind.)

So one of the non-wonderful things about trying to communicate ideas of much level of abstraction at all in the United States right now-- say, ideas about social institutions and systems and about changing them-- is that that form of thinking is hard for a lot of people, and encountering it makes them feel less themselves, and that makes them feel angry. And since so many of our cultures here are heavily hierarchical, that means that an attempt at communication is approach as instance for war.

It's tiring.