Verde Que Te Quiero Verde

As a student of psychology, I learned that the human brain needs categorization for comprehension. As an example, children formulate a definition of a "tree" based on the elm tree outside of their Massachusetts school or the palm trees lining the Los Angeles boulevard near home. Then, when an unfamiliar tree comes into the picture, it is at first foreign, undefinable, until that category of "tree" is expanded to include this new meaning and all the features that accompany it.

It turns out that we rely on this categorization mechanism to process nearly all the information that we encounter. Faces, places, names and objects all filter through a complex series of categorical worlds until suddenly (hopefully) a match can be made. Recognition follows shortly after.

Paradoxically, what enables us to pick up where we left off day after day also binds us to a strangely limiting need to process events and features based on what we have experienced and seen before. For relationships, this means an inevitable and awkward consideration of who we are currently dealing with in relation to those we have dealt with before, in other situations, in other moments, in seemingly disconnected scenarios. The result is a perpetual string of relational ties that enables us to make some sense of a situation that would otherwise be intangible, incomprehensible, and wonderfully, beautifully new. Why do we fight against this relational activity that our brains immediately plunge into? Why do we desire original experiences yet immediately rationalize them through comparison to anything that shares a feature or two with what we have, momentarily, found exhilaratingly fresh?