Categories

Our brains love categories. Our minds are constantly parsing our days into bits and pieces, making decisions and drawing conclusions based on slivers of evidence.

It’s survival, the animal in us protecting our unearned gift of life, forcing us to break into tribes, to play it safe, to keep walking the same lines until we form ruts in the rock so deep that we’ll never again veer off track.

Categories have a purpose, but they are, by their very purpose, keeping us apart from one another.

The great tragedy of “categories” is that every single one of us uses them every day in almost every way and yet not one of us wants to be in one.

We know we’re bigger than that, bigger than any single category, moment, or act. We know this to be true for us but for some reason, particularly when the chips are down and a slice of the pie is at stake, we can’t seem to acknowledge that it’s true for everyone else as well.

We just keep walking our lines and breaking the world into pieces.