Duality

     Why questions. Why questions? Why question?
     Complicated language, English.
     Today, I listened to a podcast about linguistic analysis.  Specifically, it was about the "gendering" of languages like Latin, Spanish, and German. Instead of asking what the masculinity and femininity does or is in those languages, the podcast was asking a more difficult question: why do human languages have them in the first place?  The conversation smoothly moved into one about the naturally dual nature of our consciousness. There's no simple answer to the difficult question, but what answers there are seem to lie deeply rooted in our minds.
     I wonder if it's a defense mechanism - an evolutionary safeguard. If there's anything that is fundamental to the human condition, it's categories. We organize the world - us and them; good and bad; with and against; right and wrong - naturally and ceaselessly. These categories are primal. But do they make any sense? Our very facility with language makes us assume that categories are meaningful (most words are categories, right?), but in that sense do they ignore reality?
     Let me put it like this: categories are shorthand ways of dealing with the world, but that doesn't mean that the things we place in categories belong there or actually share anything.
     I just listened to lots of analysis of the NBA draft, and I root for a baseball team that cannot figure it out. Sports fans and executives are constantly "typing" players. This team needs a rangy, long-armed jump shooter, while that one needs a big who can space the floor and run on the break. The Royals have needed starting pitching since 1994 and have drafted every type of player conceivable. And yet if the people were reducable down to these categories, why can't we simply put sports teams together by formula? Surround a superstar big man with above average slashers, shooters, and plus defenders, and you'll have a winning team. Except when you don't.
    That's where "chemistry" is invoked. It's the wild card that fills in the gaps of logic that these types of people are the winning type while these others aren't. Analysts want to know why this team won that game that time while ignoring that the elements involved are completely unreproduceable. Our need for order in the universe forces our minds to believe that we can exert control where we can't. Decisions will be made, shots will be missed, great hitters will strike out. Unpredictably. Afterwards, we'll think we should've predicted it. Next time, we'll know what's going to happen. And because the outcomes are so simple - win or lose - we'll judge from the feedback even though we probably won't do so accurately.
      I feel like parenting is a similar game with a similar problem.
     There are so many right ways to parent and so many wrong. So many decisions that will be pivotal and so many others that only seem so. What type of child do I have, what are the right ways to nurture and develop her? But what I have is a person - individual and unlike any other. I don't mean that in the smarmy, "we're all special" sort of way. Instead, I mean that most of what puts us in the category of "human" is superficial compared to what makes us the individuals that we are. When I spend my energy trying to figure out the type of person I'm raising, I can lose sight of the actual person I'm raising.
     A psychologist I know told me that there was a school of thought in psychology when he was in college  that saw all psychology as individual. That one can only analyze and treat a person's psyche, not the type of person that he is. I am not a psychologist, and I may not have even described that correctly, but it rang in my ears. What value is there in "typing" yourself or others? I can only see expedience. It eliminates the need to actually know anyone or yourself. I find myself caught in ruts so often because doing something different is not what my type of person does.
     Ultimately, it's probably a function of our brain's need for categories. I need the world to fall into categories - loved and hated; success and failure; moral and immoral; grown-up and child - so that I can sleep at night believing that my life is predictable.