Basket Cases

There was a boy who, when he learned to think, learned that there were three colors. He loved those three colors until he learned that there was yellow, blue, and purple as well. He was about to settle down with these colors, and then he learned that there was orange, beige, crimson, and that there were thousands of other colors. Not only colors — there were alphabets, numbers, and people. People in the past and present. People had names, and they had done things that shaped the present.

He learned that there wasn’t enough space in his head to understand them all, so he started grouping things into buckets. He would label the buckets and categorize them, he would learn to define the categories and make associations. Then he would put these buckets into larger buckets, going on and on. He never learned anything deep enough. He tried — he spent years on some of these buckets — but he never understood them well enough.

The truth is that I am like him. I have always categorized music, food, people, books, places, ethnicities, races, and I have never understood them well enough. I don’t have the time, and I never will. Knowledge is infinite, and my time here is finite.

I, the person who I spend most of my time with, don’t understand myself enough, let alone others. There are some things that I deeply resent, and there are things that I can’t get enough of. I am sure I have been loving the wrong things and hating the wrong buckets.

But there is one definition that I have put for the bucket of the entirety of life: that there could be an infinite amount of definitions that could live in parallel. They can flow together, and eventually they will all blend into a different form which has its own infinity of explanations.

At the end, we can only group them into something general enough so that our finite brain cells can understand. And it’s okay if others categorize us into buckets with half-ass definitions. We are all baskets. Buckets. Cases. Basket cases.