We have a couple of new kitty cats running around the office thanks to my bro and family taking a few days away. For a time yesterday, we sat around enjoying their first encounter with a box full of styrofoam peanuts used for packing things. They played for the longest time. It was cool.
It reminded me of the story of a college biology class that dissected a cat as a class project. The class learned about the organs, muscles, systems, bone structure and a hundred other things about cats. By extension, they learned about human anatomy and about how things work.
They studied the cat from the inside out, and learned the names and functions of all kinds of things. They began to understand the relationship between the different parts and systems of the body. Although the subject was a cat, the object was everybody, animal and human. It is a great journey into scientific and biologic truth and knowledge. The result is a deeper, more solid understanding of how life works.
To this point, it is a very educational and productive experience for everyone except the poor cat. But the fallacy occurs right at the end when the professor closes out the last lecture by saying,
"And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a cat."The fallacy is that a cat is not a collection of bones, tissues and organs that the class learned about. These things do not make a cat. We will never understand cats by looking at them from this perspective.
If we want to know what a cat is, we need to observe one stretching and basking in the morning sun, or playing with a yarn ball, or chasing a mouse, or defending itself against an overbearing, obnoxious dog, or obsessively cleaning itself. The essence of a cat is not learnable through dissection, but only through observation, just as the essence of words are not found in their denotation, but in their connotation.
We spend so much time criticizing, judging and dissecting each other you'd think we were all college professors teaching biology classes and dissecting cats. And we spend entirely too much time dissecting ourselves.
We need to live. We need to let each other live. We need to observe and enjoy the quirky characteristics of people around us without dissecting them. We need to understand that God is not dissecting us, but instead he encourages us to see him in every situation, in every person and in every cat.
I'm not trying to devalue science, education, criticism, study or any such thing. I just think that sometimes we (I) overthink things to the point that we (um...I again) miss the whole point. I don't think I want to do that anymore.