In between days

Years ago when I was a student studying psychology, we spent a few weeks examining the nature of constructs. It seems to be one of the ways in which our minds capture and box concepts of things up for us, labelled carefully in our best handwriting so that we can recognise them again later. This means we can, for instance, identify the table-ness of a uniquely unfamiliar one as long as it has a flat surface, say; the number of legs it has or the fact it is small enough for only a singular ant to sit at is quite irrelevant to our concept.

Being the smart machines they are, our brains don’t just reserve this ability for the real stuff we can touch but apply this boxing and labelling approach to more abstract areas of the world around us. Emotions, relationships, obligations, altruism, ambition – you name it, your mind’s got a construct for it. And because we love to label things so much, because it’s one of our addictions, our minds will stretch and stretch our established definition to accommodate the new criteria we’ve stumbled across. Call it economy of mental storage if you like (or laziness if you’re being blunt) but we do generally seem to prefer to adapt an existing concept rather than go to the bother of constructing a whole new different one.

Which is fine for the most part.

Except when it’s not.

The first thing that sent my brain into a whirl of construct burrowing this morning was the weather. Being English of course, the weather is always a topic of conversation. Being weather, it’s equally always there to be talked about. It’s a confusing picture right now: sunny one moment, dull and grey the next; mild in a way but bone gnawing cold round the next corner; buds starting to appear on the trees but prone any morning to be nipped off by the frost. Not hard winter but not yet spring, it’s kind of in between somewhere, a seasonal transition. Nearly-but-not-quite-spring-but-not-really-still-winter-either is pretty useless as a definition and doesn’t really cut the construct mustard. Not least as that’s possibly the clumsiest label you’ll come across.

The second thing to jump on the construct bandwagon was thinking about the nature of relationships. Not romantic ones necessarily (a topic on which I am just about as far from being an expert as it is possible to get) but friendships. I’ve always taken a kind of archery target-shaped mentality towards the nature of friendships. In the central gold circle, the inner ring if you like, are your very best friends and closest family members, the people that you feel comfortable and safe with, in whom you confide, upon on whose shoulder you cry, whose triumphs and disasters you feel as keenly as if they were your own. Experience has shown me that friends of this type are pretty much immune to the vagaries of proximity or frequency of meeting; when the bond is this strong, it is almost immune from severance.

The next circle out might contain good friends and perhaps a few colleagues, those with whom you share and do some things but always with an awareness of an invisible line of familiarity and level of engagement that shouldn’t be crossed. Beyond that lie acquaintances, most workmates and perhaps some distant rarely seen relatives that you have a fondness for but not to the extent that you’ll make extreme efforts to meet up with or see them. There may be some ebb and flow, some exchange of places in this zone, and people may be promoted or relegated through the passage of time and circumstance. Outside the three circles is the white square around the target. As an arrow shot here won’t count in an archery tournament, folk who reside here don’t usually place much burden upon the consciousness.

But what about the friends that I haven’t actually met in real life at all? I guess my essentially stone age brain is attempting to grapple with the huge significance of friends that one makes through the ether, via websites and blogs and e-mails and such. We may not yet have met (and in most cases probably never will) but these friends touch my life and enrich it just as surely as if we’d spent the afternoon sitting next to the fire in a country pub drinking warm ale and talking toffee.

Which seems a very good motivation to create a new construct on an in-betweeny Friday afternoon.

‘In Between Days’ is a song from the 1985 album “The Head on the Door” by The Cure. It’s one of my all time favourites.