Categorization

I came across my diaries from school the other day. I was about 14 and in love with this boy, my first love.
When I think about him now I remember it fondly, all the anticipation and planning how to get him, how to make him love me, how to win him over...and it looks fun and casual and playful, almost a good story.
But reading what I wrote back then gives me another perspective to this story. It takes me back to those days.
This was my first love experience. I thought I had only one chance to love someone and I will never, ever get over him. The dramatic effect is all over the pages, pure and simple.
What would you do if this indeed was the truth, if you knew that you only had one chance to love in life and you fell in love just like that, no choice over whom with?
Nothing after that forever, no one new.
Would you allow it to fade away, your one chance wasted, or would you fight for it tooth and nail, till the bitter end?


As humans, I guess every one of us is eager to have all the components of our lives sorted under some sort of rule. Categorised. In order.
Why do we need to do that?
How does one make a decision about something, understand something without being able to assign the particular matter to some sort of category or being able to compare against something.
If we did not have such systems, how would we ever discriminate against bad experiences, know what we should avoid, what we should stay away from, what we should aspire to.
Therefore, it is a valuable system, almost irreplaceable.
But it is not infallible.

Categorisation systems are complex and difficult to define. Is something a member of a category because it is the same as other members of that category or does one judge something to be a member of a particular category on basic similarities?
To confuse this matter further, there are 'somatic markers', a psychological term that depicts the way we use our personal experiences to guide us in the future. Like a gut feeling.
Everything that happens to us comes to mean something. We remember it, we feel it, we strive to understand it, process it and categorise it.
Then it becomes our past.
But before it becomes our past, we store it.

They say that remembering something depends on the emotional intensity of the experience, as well as on repetition.
So I guess that the older we get, the better we get at using the somatic markers as well as having more of them to guide us.
Surely, this is a good thing, they serve as signs along a way, like a sign for a sharp bend, or a stop sign, or even as a traffic light that tells us when it is safe to go.
But is life ever like that, completely rule based or do we get none the wiser with all the knowledge that we obtain along the way?
And do these markers serve to save us from the peril or serve to prevent us from all future experiences that might come our way?

See, this is where categorization plays a part. If one does not manage to categorise something properly, there is a chance that our markers will kick in and try to save us, saying sharp bend, where there is none, just because we decided that this road looked like a road that might have sharp bends when it doesn't.


We note the sign and slow down to avoid the peril of sharp bends, thinking that we are smart going cautiously only to be killed by the hydraulic lorry behind us that did not realise we were slowing down for the imaginary bend.
Pretty fucked up, ha?


I guess categorization is everything, but what influences it? What are the rules?
Is it the similarity that decides the category? But surely two incidents that appear the same might not have the same background or explanation, so how can they be categorized as the same? But how do we know that?
Life has no guarantees. Perfect in its imperfection, it teaches us valuable lessons, but the smarter we get, more cautious we get, and better at using all we have to avoid the danger.
But do we also not get paranoid, ready to categorise any little thing as danger and heartache and we run away from it only to be killed somewhere else anyway.
Or we just stay in, safe in our own world, nothing ventured, nothing gained...but safe none-the-less.
All because we categorized wrong, categorization that happened due to the fact that we reacted to someone else's categorization, which also could have been contaminated with markers that serve to protect but only ever confuse us further.

It is a wonder people get together at all, find each other. Is it mostly moments of madness that allow that, those that we render crazy but we allow it to remind ourselves that we are alive, that we are still here and our lives are there to be used by someone, understood, shared...
But then, moments pass, as everything does, they fade, they lose their momentum and we are too old to go chasing after moments. We evaluate instead, we think, we plan, we like the way we have set it all up by now and why should we change?
And this is where we start to categorize.
And we calculate everything, write it all down in order to understand it better, decide if that is what we want, if that is what counts as something.
And the markers come in handy too. They tell us what we don't want, what we want to avoid, what will make us vulnerable... I know that I would never ever again put myself on the line like I did back when I was 14.

Now imagine two people that have engaged in the same moment, both different, both with their own rules, their own categorization system, their own markers, markers so individual and precise and so intangible to anyone else...and is no wonder nothing ever happens and people get bitter and cynical and we give up and we blame it all on others, on our lifestyles, on the incompatibility, on our habits.
And we wait for someone new, someone that will fit better, be better, won't hurt us, won't confuse us, won't cause us anguish.
I once asked my aunt that never married why hasn't she married.
She said that the one she wanted to marry never wanted to marry her and the one that wanted to marry her, she never wanted to marry.
I am in two minds if things should be easy, fall into place immediately and fit just right, or is that only a dream after a certain age. Should we not treat each and every occasion as it was a first experience, pristine, pure, innocent, and not contaminated with previous hurt, rejection, humiliation, anguish and anxiety...
It seems that, inadvertly, what made us smarter in the first place, proves to be our demise.