Things I Just Don't Get

In my 71 years of age, I have come to know understanding as a two-pronged fork.  Either you do, or you don't.  Yet even that is complicated.  There are things we understand at a cognitive level--things we can see or have been proven.  That is the intellectual side of us that concludes that we understand a given issue based on what makes sense.  Then there are things that we understand on an emotional level.  This is where the heart trumps the brain with things that, if we were honest about them, wouldn't happen because they don't make sense, cognitively.  Sometimes, making decisions about issues prods one part of us to accede to other parts of us...with disastrous results.  If I truly don't understand a situation, I can say, "I don't understand"...which means, "Please fill me in with more details that make more sense to me"--things that fit into my experience that can help to fill the gaps in my level of comprehension.  Sometimes, no amount of details or explanation will help, and that is when I say, not "I don't understand", but "I don't get it".  That means that I don't understand, and no amount of explaining will help.  It means I've tried to understand but it hasn't happened yet.  It doesn't mean that I've given up--only that...well...I'm just not there yet and don't know that I ever will.

The first time I came to understand the "I don't get it" thing was back in the late 90s when I determined that I wanted to become an amateur radio operator.  (How I came to that conclusion is a whole other post.)  Suffice it to say that I was fascinated about the invisible things in the physical world that I wanted to be part of.  Amateur radio geekdom was a whole other culture and brotherhood that I needed at the time.  And I did it.  I passed the tests by memorizing the answers.  Truth be told, even though I TAUGHT electromagnetic waves to my elementary school students at one time, I didn't understand it all, myself.  I resisted the old-time ham operators notion that you had to know how to take a radio apart and put it back together again to be a good radio operator.  (I mean, you don't have to know how to fix a car in order to be a good driver.  What's the difference??)  In those days, I relied a lot on my other radio friends to do the stuff to help me that I couldn't do.  They were wonderful in their support, sometimes in ways that saved my skin in life--not only in radio situations.  I supplied the enthusiasm.  They supplied the technical knowledge.  It was a wonderful marriage of the minds.  But to this day, I simply do not get how it all works, technically.  I've studied and studied, but am convinced that I will never, ever really get it.  I have the highest radio license possible.  I got it honestly, but if I'd missed ONE more question on the FCC test, I would have failed.  (What do you call the person who passes the medical class test with the lowest grade?  Doctor!)  And so it was/is with me.

Another thing I simply don't get is how to solve a Rubik's cube.  Yeah, I know it isn't a big deal in life, but my grandson is really into cubing competitions.  He's not in it to win but keeps shaving seconds off his "solving" time.  Rubik's cubes have been around for a looong time.  I have never, ever been able to solve one.  My grandson can solve one, professionally scrambled, in about 18 seconds.  That isn't even a record, but it blows my aged mind.  He has tried to show me patterns in solving, that he can see in five seconds of pre-competition solves, but I simply don't think I can ever get it.  God bless my grandson, he gave me a 3x3x3 cube for Christmas, which now sits on its stand on top of my computer hutch.  I've thought about scrambling it and trying to solve it, but I don't believe for a second that I could do it...which means that the cube will stay in its pristine condition on my hutch until/unless he comes to visit to save me from a scrambled cube!  It's like Big Bang Theory's episode about the Schrodinger's cat experiment.  The cat, put in a sealed box, cannot be understood as alive or dead until the box is opened.   I'm afraid to scramble my cube for fear that I can never solve it unless my grandson is here to do it!!

More problematic in the idea of understanding is trying to "get" what is not in your own experience.  On the top of my list is depression/anxiety.  My first introduction to someone with chronic depression was through my former in-law's friends, Delmas and Beulah.  Beulah had been through everything known to medicine at the time to relieve her depression...even shock therapy...to no avail.  My in-laws didn't understand it...and I didn't understand it.  And then it hit my own family, from several angles.

When you first discover that someone you love is struck with depression or anxiety, the first reaction is to rush in to help, because it's just momentary, right?  Oh...well...that didn't work.  So the next step is to try harder...but it is never enough.  You can say, "Buck up" or "Get off your butt and do stuff" or "You need to do this or that or blah, blah, blah"...but all of that is from a place of not understanding what it is like for the sufferer.  YOU don't experience it, so YOU don't understand, no matter how much you love the person who is down.  It's a pretty useless feeling for both sufferer and helper.  It doesn't help to point out how they are wrong about their perceptions because their perceptions are their reality.   Even worse is a person who suffers from it but doesn't accept it, trying to support someone who truly does.  Anxiety is a physical/psychological response to an imagined threat to one's own well-being.  It doesn't matter that the threat isn't really there.  It doesn't matter that the sufferer is loved and supported in every way possible.  It is their reality, and that reality is all they can feel.  And sometimes, the anxiety-sufferer has already found ways to hide their fears and cope long before anyone else ever knew how he/she felt.  And there's the rub. How can you help something you neither know nor understand?  I don't get it.

That doesn't mean I don't care.  It only means that I don't understand...and maybe I never will.  But it doesn't mean I will ever stop trying.  Old dogs DO learn new tricks.  I just never give up.  I will maintain my FCC radio license in spite of my technical ignorance.  I might try to solve a Rubik's again some day.  And I will continue to try to understand those of my family who are anxious. 
I admit, I don't always get it, but I'll go to my grave trying!