Life’s Complications
June 14th, 2006Over the past year my life has become enmeshed in situations best described as overwhelmingly complicated. I can’t figure them out.
What is it that makes a situation complicated? What is “complicated”?
The death of my cat last year was difficult, but hardly complicated. There was a fairly smooth linear progression from healthy cat to sick cat to very sick cat to dead cat. Simple, really.
Several years ago I closely followed a carjacking case that more nearly illustrates “complicated”. A man was robbed of his car at gunpoint. Four suspects were apprehended, two with the car, two later on. A gun was found in the car. BUT, one of the suspects threw away a second gun as he fled the car. The second gun was a BB gun. There was no reliable way to prove which gun was actually used to commit the crime.
Complicated situations are characterized by a certain multi-dimensionality. Trying to sort them out is like trying to pick out one particular wire embedded in a clump of multi-colored wires disappearing into a small hole. Or they are like a circle touched by a tangent. What belongs to the line and what belongs to the circle? In the carjacking case, it is impossible to sort out the story of the individual weapons.
That last brings me to my next point. We often don’t have enough facts to describe exactly what is going on. And of course people provide a further complication. I suppose there are at least as many perspectives on a given situation as there are people involved.
I’m thinking of the color scheme of complicated situations and supposing that while there is very little black and white there are many, many shades of gray.
I’m with you on this one. I have been thinking along these lines for awhile now myself. I have several complicated situations in my life currently…people are definitely what complicates them, and two people rarely have the same perspective on a given situation…not having all the information can be difficult, but our response can be godly without having to know everything…we have to respond the best we can with the information we have…but so often lately I find myself having no idea what the right thing is to say, or to do…even among all “good” choices…
Jessica-
Good point about the godly response.
It’s just that sometimes I want to know what I think about a situation as well, and in the more complicated ones I can’t get my mind around them enough to figure out what I think.
The other reason I’m interested in this is because of writing.
I have read most of a series of historical novels by Eugenia Price. She is very careful to set up the growing tensions between north and south over slavery, and she heavily emphasizes the Trail of Tears (1838-1839), vividly painting its injustice. But she barely mentions the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) and all the injustice behind that.
Her novels are not complex. I suppose it is much easier to write a less complex novel. I’d like to write a novel that is thoroughly tangled and complex, so that the reader feels like there is no way to solve the problems…