I'm an abstract guy. I think about way more things than I actually do, and live a disembodied life largely as a brain on a stick. I'm often surprised I have a body. Slowly though, over the last decade, I've been learning to de-abstract, and it's been very beneficial for me. I learned as a kid that the easiest way to handle tough emotions was to think about them one level up. I learned to always replace "ouch, ouch, omg, ow, this is a bummer" with "is it good that I feel this way in this moment?". That process was a foolproof way of insulating myself from the intensity of sad emotions.
The problem is that abstracting away from pain and retreating into reflection is addictive. Søren Kierkegaard wrote in The Present Age: "The individual does not have the passion to rip himself away from either the coils of reflection or the seductive ambiguities of reflection," and I found that to be true. As I grew older, I got really good at avoiding the material through a sort of anti-calcification, where I processed my life and feelings through a vague and nebulous gas cloud of mental existence. I minimized the amount I really lived in my object-level experiences, and as a result, absolutely won at the small micro-game of "having as little surface area for pain to activate over as possible." I was good at living this way, and liked it. I loved it. It was my self-concept to a large degree, and would have left me an increasingly vaporous and useless person. In learning to not let any visceral experience grasp me against my will, I was turning myself into someone who couldn't grasp anything real either.
I lived like this all through my teenage life, until one day in my freshman year of college my mentor, the Most Reverend Father Robb, challenged me that we were commanded to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. While I was really, really, really, really good at loving God with my mind, I was abysmal at all the rest. Did I have a heart? He didn't feel like I did; I didn't feel either, so maybe he was right. This was something I needed to change. This encouragement came at the right time, and saved me and made me. Over the next few years, I lucked into finding friends who loved people and loved art and loved adventure and the visceral here-now of life, and I became a human.
Looking back on it, there was an interesting aspect to the journey of de-abstracting myself in which irony poisoning existed as a transition state between non-feeling and true enjoyment, and I'm really grateful for it. I don't mind it, even though it's trash, because it at least has an element of caring deeply about something, if only to immediately whip around and destroy it with a blast of your critical gaze. Feeling convicted enough about something to at least mock it takes literally one bit of care, and that one bit is infinitely more than nothing.
I'm glad I learned more ways to live life than just distancing myself from it all the time. I don't think all abstraction is all bad. Detachment and abstraction is safe and secure, and actually pretty cool. There is real value in clear thinking done alone and removed from distraction. There is real value in clear-mindedness. However, it is only one tool, and should be part of a broad set of techniques that we apply to life.
On their own, done too much, abstraction and intellectualization slowly become a replacement for action—why risk trying and failing at something, when instead you can be right all the time all along without any risk or real effort? At the end of the day, your ideas have to actually touch reality if they are to actually mean anything; you have to attach to something if you want to live fully.
I started the St. Bertha of Kent circular and the events within it because I want to create a venue for attachment and connection. I want to chew on great ideas with friends, and share life together. I want something that requires investment and work, but that leaves the people who take part in it better off. It is good to have people you care about, who you are trying to impress, and who you live in front of and for. Getting your thoughts out of your head and sharing them with someone else is the first step to doing something about them, and is a small and tractable risk that makes you alive and present.
I'm thirty years old, and God willing I live to be at least 150. I can't wait to see how many people I get to care about, how many emotions I get to deeply feel, how many cool conversations I get to have. I'm eager to live life immediately and viscerally.
Mark Bowen