The Role Of Context In Becoming Our Best

Context is everything. And everything must change.

a giant alien looks into planet earth through a prism, surreal digital art — by DALL·E

If we dip into linguistics, even for a brief and superficial period, one of the first things we will learn is that context is everything. Depending on the location of its speakers, a language may have a dozen words for what we refer to as ‘white’ in English. Depending on the lifestyle of its community, a tongue may only have a couple of verb tenses, one to indicate immediacy and another to point at moments further from now, regardless of whether they are in the past or future.

Similarly, in Southern European languages, the sentence ‘we were planning to play football, but it started raining’ makes sense. In their northern counterparts, the recipient of such a communication would be perplexed because if rain were an argument to cancel outdoor activities, there wouldn’t be much going on. While it is understandable to postpone a game when the probability of optimum weather is high, it is also easy to fall into the trap of accepting bad weather as a valid excuse to cancel an event and, inevitably, live under the authority of something we cannot control. Every culture is brimming with tenets nobody dares question. The context may have mutated, but it takes far more than that to shake established principles.