From when you were in elementary school to probably where you are now, you have probably been formally introduced to the simple Venn Diagram. These two alluring circles overlap in the second dimension, housing words or phrases that your teachers had you "Compare and Contrast" when all other assignments were out of the question. They could be used to help you prepare for the two standardized test stories that Texas pays bajillions of dollars for, or they could contrast engineering majors. Just engineering majors. No other context. Here's a simple Venn Diagram for organisms:
SilverStar at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons
And yes! These cuties are helpful, but only as helpful as the extent of your mental capability in that one highschool English period where it's cold and freezing and cold. And cold. But it has a flaw, and that flaw is something that modern teachers don't bother to tell us about because--hey--they get paid based off of our test scores and NOT how we function as human beings capable of having neurons that fire!
And what is that flaw, you might ask? Why is it so elusive, and how does it represent the style of modern teaching that teachers douse us with? (Pretend a crowd is chanting)
These diagrams gives us the notion that, hey, we can only be one thing at once. We only experience this "present" once, and you only have read the previous word once, and there is only one object to compare to at a given time. A circle only has so much it can overlap to, and in this 2-D space that it is allotted, it cannot do that. Unless you make another circle:
Watchduck., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Or another:
Watchduck., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Edited.
And even so, it doesn't explain everything. I can't have a complete thought, a complete comparison with these Venn Diagrams--like, what if I wanted to have this cute diagram doing a simple three-way comparison of some keyboard layouts:
But what if I wanted another keyboard type, namely the Japanese Kana layout? Then, I'd have:
Those things that I just listed--that's life. I can make a life analogy about keyboards to make it evident how diverse the keyboards are, but it'd be the other way around--the complicatedness of life is what makes keyboards complicated. Keyboards are a result of so many languages, so many talking methods, or a theoretical tower of Babel.
And in this complicatedness of life, we are but a circle in that diagram. It's 2-D, it's virtually impossible to be everything. It's quite hard to encompass everything. It's so hard to understand everything, you are just a circle in the infinite plane of comparisons. It's this statement--this idea--that really gets drilled into you as you go through school in general: because we are just something black and white--a circle or an ellipse or an weird shape that Calc students get nightmares about--we matter not. Let me rephrase that: Thinking about everything in a black-and-white manner (Oh, you're good at Physics, you'll get a 5 on the AP!; Oh, you're ENTP-T? You're ___!) really limits that scope of vision.
And this limit on vision is then exacerbated by the fact that people don't appreciate the art of stories anymore.
A story is an ode to someone. A story is an ode to somebody. In a story, you are in someone else's shoes, in someone else's timeline, in someone else's social circle, in someone else's Venn Diagram. You garner more knowledge, furthering your connections.
And you know how people say that you are defined by what you are not? These are the people that look at the half-empty glass and say that they could get their bum out of the chair and fill it. They are the people that are the "growth mindset" that the aforementioned teachers tell us about, the ones so successful that they can drink more water.
And in my opinion, they are the ones who are correct! In terms of the betterment of life, of course. So what're you getting to, you yapper? Read more books! Read 'em!
