Some days in my home city invited me to write about context.  My reflection started with the wish to transmit at least a tiny little bit of what was happening there. Some reflections, ideas, inclusive emotions, but unfortunately it was not possible to do so. Even if I was an expert of narrative or qualitative descriptions (which I am not), any outstanding description could have make just that: describe things.

Each context is so wide, full and rich, that any attempt to enclose it with words it just limits the transmission of the experience dramatically. It leaves just a “interpretation” of experiences.

I started to see that each single moment of life encloses several moving systems. Those systems are interwoven between them and between a diversity of persons, situations and other moments to actually create the actual context. In few words, my reaction at that moment was: it is impossible and/or misleading to isolate  things with the only goal to understand them, (when talking about culture, human behavior, experiences, etc.) It is a must to understand the whole picture first, or at least more than one dimension in order to go later to the details. If I start just with one small piece is not representative enough.

If we are only describing one element according to our understanding, then we are only comparing it with our actual reality and/or context, which btw might be complete different than the reality we seek to understand.  We only are looking things in the way we want to look at them, and when you look something, for sure you are not observing something else.

Furthermore, I put in doubt the idea to understand the whole if we do not get involved and immerse in the world we seek to understand. Be just an observer is not good enough for understand experience, unless we are asking for the experience of the observers, not of the actors. Some experiences can’t be understood without being lived. And even the understanding of those, only happen through time and when we are ready to understand the experiences.

For me, right now, until we make the reality we are studying or sharing, part of our reality, it is at that moment when perhaps we will be able to understand a bit more clearer the context, and be able to communicate some of the details that form part of it. Otherwise any of the context definitions or relative descriptions stay in a some kind of superficial level of interpretation, even if they are very sophisticated and complex the concepts, still are not able to capture it.

where is up & where is down?. Can the reference change according to the context? 🙂