When I inevitably feel the need to explain a concept or idea I’ve been learning intently, I tend towards analogies, like the kind you’d find in a Malcolm Gladwell book. The ability to take an abstract phenomena and render it through conventional experiences is what I like to think is the hallmark of a natural scientist. I’m not a natural scientist, but I admire them greatly. There’s something about taking detached, almost clinical descriptions from an expert and making it palatable for a person who’s willing to lend an ear.
My favourite is to render systems, like psychosocial (think an unhealthy dynamic between a parent and child) and depict it in neutral terms. I find that, yes, the immediate reactions we have are susceptible to our own experiences and views, which make us human, yet the steadying of the tide does wonders for garnering a generalized way of understanding, which can be applied to other experiences and even ‘cut-through’ existing instances of perhaps the same phenomena within our own sphere of experience. What might otherwise have stayed as an immediate, facile understanding can be elevated into an analysis. The power that comes with an analytical view is insight, taking what seemed to be a tool for a single job, and transforming it into a multitool for a variety of jobs.
Though the risk of overextending occurs when one relies on an analytical view for too many experiences. It’s at times too powerful, it can lend itself explanatory power to nearly any experience, and without testing or falsification, it can lead to explaining nearly everything with such analyses. Which is why I like to see it as a tool to reframe rather than as an explanation.