BLACK HOLES OF UNDERSTANDING

I feel like this has happened a few times recently, so that means I can definitely talk about it.

It might be tiredness. Or it might be my brain slowing down. Or it might just be that I've become completely set-in-my-ways about the way I like to think about things.

The other day I went to Bracknell. My cousin Walty and I are planning our 40th birthday celebrations for next year and I was trying (really hard) to get my head around what in the world she was talking about.

I couldn't do it. She was leaping from detail to detail, not brainstorming but actually planning and deciding, but so quickly that I couldn't keep up! I needed to see the whole picture, so I constantly found myself having to rewind the conversation and think about what the entire thing looked like. I found it really uncomfortable. I'm a big-picture-person, she's a detail-wizard.

She's brilliant by the way. And I reckon she thinks the same about me, it's just that we're really different. And I had to try to cope with the things that were simple and quick to her, which were also black holes of understanding for me.

These black holes are everywhere. I get them at work too. I'll be fifty before I understand how Transport Layer Security (TLS) works. The words are on the screen in front of me; the mastery of it may as well be on Jupiter.

I feel my heart pounding with frustration. I ought to know this. It ought to be as simple as everyone else finds it. I'm bothered that I can't work it out. I'm scared by how slow or thick it makes me look, which is of course, just another way of saying that I am actually proud of how clever I am.

Dong! goes the massive bell of recognition. Yes, that'll be it. Pride.

Yet what these black-holes of understanding prove is that cleverness doesn't really exist. After all, if one person struggles with algebra or quadratic equations or Latin verbs, how is that any less valid than another person struggling with how to see the best way forward when planning a complicated party?

I think I've said this before - cleverness needs context, and that makes it subjective to the situation in which it's required. So my clunking pride has been a game of shadows and rainbows all along anyway.

You can't see into a black hole because light can't escape from it. It's a gravitational well that sucks in everything, including light and information - much like pride itself, I suppose, blinding you to the truth of the matter.

So, perhaps I should welcome those massive things I don't understand. Perhaps I shouldn't be embarrassed that I can't multiply two pairs of numbers in my head and then add them together without forgetting one of them. Who cares? I have to double-check how to spell 'occasion' sometimes because the letters get mixed up in my brain.

So what?

Oh and I don't understand TLS or how to plan the logistics of a party.

But I don't care because there are other people who do, and can. And their black holes of understanding are not mine, and mine are not theirs. That's rather a beautiful thing, isn't it, when we can all get over ourselves.