Understand

Understand is a word we all understand.

Yet, to me, it is a word so very mythical... (don't know whether this is really the right word... or maybe "not quite sure" or simply "not understanding"-- yet the use of not understanding simply makes it a run-on sentence looking like a dog chasing its own tail... 8-O lol)

I might have told you this before....

It was about 10 years after I had been a professional student in psychology, going from the general studies in the undergrad to Forensic psychology, counseling psychology, developmental psychology and cognitive psychology--- one day, I was in one of my adviser's cognitive psychology class and this question came up to me that, however dumb it might make me look, I just had to ask...

"What is cognition?"

The most classic definition would be simply, "how people think."

What about the theories?

The theories are the ideas people come up with to explain how people think.

I knew this definition but I still could not understand.

I guess this must be analogous to what psychopaths feels about moral issues--- they hear the sound but not the music. 8-O

The question was answered but I still could not understand it... While, at the same time, I lived through all those previous years not even though that question of my exist... 8-O lol

It was at least not until a few more years later, I was with a good friend of mine, taking same classes and moved through our schooling together...

All of a sudden, I felt it... I was excited like a small kid getting a red envelop for the Chinese New Year (could you understand that feeling? lol) or again like that wing-flapping chicken I have so very often referred to....

I so very excitedly and proudly said to my friend, "I know what cognition means!!!"

Then, I must have said the same thing my advisor had said to me many years ago... when trying to explain to my friend what my understanding of cognition was.

Thereafter, many things happened in life and many similar experiences emerge...

Like, when I last went to see my orthopedics doctor, I guess, sort of out of desperation, asked, "Why do I have to stop?"

My doctor's answer was simple and straight forward, "Hernia."

Yet, today, as I got off the bus to get to work, the spasm was much worse than it was--- guess it might have something to do with the wind tunnel created by the tall buildings along 120 Th street with the Hudson river at the other end...

I stopped and my body bent down before I could finally straighten it up.

"Hernia."

My doctor's word I thought of.

Yet, despite all that I have read and experienced, somehow, still, can I not feel or appreciate this simple word, "Hernia."

And, I asked again,

"Why the stop?"