Every Square Inch

      Every square inch… and that’s a good thing :  The rapidity at which life seems to flux from one moment to the next, changing context often without changing setting, intriguing, and even more harrowing.  A splendid party can quickly become a house of mourning with one phone call.  A moment of tension can be palliated between a couple with the laughter of a child.  But beyond being interesting or vexing, this moving target of the temperament of life is rather a reminder of the necessity for a big-picture framework, more than anything.  Due to our singularity of focus - limit one item per customer - our attention focuses like a scattered laser beam:  it can only be pointed in one direction, but even then it is diluted.  In one sense, this is very good.  Conversely, in another sense, this is the inverse of good.  It’s good we can focus on a task singularly, despite potential distractions.  I would like to know my surgeon was focused on surgery and not how to improve his golf swing while operating.  However, singularity of focus, or rather scope, can potentially be detrimentally inhibitory.  Because we have an innate capacity to focus on one thing at a time, sometimes, we set the mental capacitors to autopilot on one channel and every other signal coming in just gets filtered out as noise.  When this is done for too long, this is how monomaniacs develop – those obsessed with one, and only one, thing. 

Suppose you like gardening.  You read gardening magazines, go to gardening exposés, and watch the Home and Gardening network non-stop.  There’s nothing wrong with any of these things.  The problem enters when gardening becomes your ultimate frame of reference towards life.  Practically, that would mean you miss an opportunity to serve your neighbor because you had to water the garden – hypotonic pressure is important for maintaining robust vegetables after all.  You yell at your neighbor because they walked through your garden.  You have a slight sense of superiority because you do not eat steroid-laced, pesticide soaked foods, but only the pristine variety…from your own garden.  This is merely one example, but a prime one to show that anything less than a framework that speaks to all of life was not meant to bear the weight we place on it, and subsequently shift that weight to those around us.  Though an imbalance in proper nutrition may lead to slight irritability, gardening cannot speak to the frustration one is having because they are experiencing technical problems with their computer, having marriage problems, or their teenage daughter’s self image issues.  What reference frame can encompass and speak to joy, depression, anger, excitement, birth, life, death, marriage, family, celebration, work, war, peace, food, organic, inorganic, immaterial (the invisible), sex, money, study, history, the future, ants, camels, travel, culture…and even gardening?  Welcome to the gospel of Jesus Christ!