It’s startling to realize, suddenly, how often we strive to understand a situation by limiting it. We plunge in hastily, drawing lines, cutting off examples, offloading data we can’t integrate, collapsing tension we can’t handle. We hunt for stereotypes to cling to or condemn, until even our encounters with stereotypes become stereotyped.

The nature of the Trinity, the afterlife of pets, the differences between men and women, the psychology of politics – is there an end to the list of things we try to understand by making them as small and simplistic as possible? We’re rarely satisfied until all the evidence has been distorted.

Life is not simple. Not even in its smallest detail. God is not simple. Death is not simple. Is even a molecule simple? Can it be?

What have humans been doing for as long as any of our records can recall? Discovering things we didn’t know. More and more facts. More and more dimensions. Diseases, cures, patterns, keys. All we’ve ever done is uncover what we don’t know and try to fill the abyss, or find the ladder out of it.

We need eyes in the back of our head. We need to see more than one direction. Instead of panicking over the chance that we can’t explain something, we could grasp that we’ve existed through every previous moment without having it explained.

We are actually in a multi-dimensional sea of realities at every second, and we are unaware of most of them. We discover fragments gradually, or sometimes in bursts of insight when we’ve managed to get out of our own way for several seconds at a time.

A rush to judgment is almost always a loss of information and perception. In the resulting darkness, accidents happen. There’s no cure for being finite. But there’s no call to impose even greater limits on your finite understanding, out of fear.