Two toddler-age boys drawing outside on a winter day

Winter, or whatever

I’m drawing all the seasons,
he said.
Cloudy, rainy, sunny, snowflaky, and that’s all.

That’s all,
I said.
That’s all of em.

Cloudy, rainy, sunny, and snowflake.

I love that.

It feels like we have so many choices for everything. It’s largely true.

Pick any streaming service and you’ll have content to watch for weeks, if not months or years - and yes, I emphatically reject that phrase I’ve heard multiple times : “There’s nothing good to watch on Netflix” (or ___ insert stream service)”

That being said, so many choices are pre-packaged ones; ones that come with detailed instructions and specifications for just how to assemble or build. “You can make this just like the cool picture on the box.”

As you might have guessed, I’m more of a ‘dump a pile of LEGO bricks on the floor and make something interesting and structurally impossible’ over the detailed following of instructions to build a branded spaceship or television tie-in set piece. Not knocking that; I’ve done it, but I think it’s important to leave room for open-ended imagination in making, building, drawing, playing, and life in general.

I’m a big Aristotle fan. Not because he was so right about everything. He was actually wrong about a lot. But he helped start a process of thinking in a different way and of categorizing the natural world around him. Yes, I’m also a fascinated follower of Carl Linnaeus, he of the binomial nomenclature system we use for classifying flora and fauna (e.g. Canis lupus).

Categories are super-helpful for organizing and making sense of the world around us. But just because we have a lot of pre-made categories for us - like the seasons - doesn’t mean we can’t have fun in continuing to make our own.

I’m not anti-category at all. I’m not anti-shortcut, not anti-directions or anti-instructions. I’m not anti-heuristic or anti-accepting existing ways of doing things, or of simply building on existing information and frameworks. That’s what lets us not get bogged down in (forgive the upcoming cliche phrase): it lets us not have to reinvent the wheel. See?! I didn’t come up with a new phrase, I used a classic!

So much of what we do involves using and building on what is already there. That’s good, overall.

But I also think there’s great value in examining our processes, big and small, and our categories, big and small, from time to time, and asking whether there’s better or more effective or more inclusive ways of organizing and categorizing what we do, what we say, and what we know.

Or maybe just thinking of new categories or new names for old categories that add a little flash of joy in the darkest days of…Snowflaky Season. 😊