Zoom In, Zoom Out

Each day begins with a singular focus, a dedication of the intellect that quietens all other concerns. This is my world, at least for now; grappling with questions, clarifying ideas, piecing the puzzle together, and reflecting on what it all means in real life. I’m drawn into a unique absorption. Education is meditation! In an age where attention fractures into a thousand fleeting fragments, there is profound beauty in focus: the slow, deep, deliberate work of learning. We venture beyond hollow memorisation and premature certainty, realising there’s no room for overconfidence in learning. The journey is cyclical: fascination often turns to confusion, confusion to assimilation, and then fascination anew - day after day, an intellectual rollercoaster.

This is the life of the scholar. They spend years unravelling the intricacies of a specialised field, systematically dissecting the subject and unravelling the unknown story behind it all. Yesterday I spoke to an ethnographer who transplanted himself into a foreign community for four years to write one book. He journeys to the physical space, gradually penetrating the hearts and minds of the people, tracing rituals, observing behaviours, and discerning beliefs, painstakingly weaving together a tapestry of meaning. This study is devotion – the sheer patience to embrace the fullness of complexity without reduction or haste. Learning, real learning, takes time.

Depth, however, is one element of the equation. Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of modern hermeneutics, offered his framework for interpreting information – literary, historical, spiritual or otherwise. He proposes the hermeneutic circle: we can only understand the whole through its parts, and the parts through the whole. To grasp a single word, we are called to situate it within the landscape of the text; to grasp the text, we attend carefully to every word. Meanings emerge within this dynamic tension, a continual movement between precision and perspective. Zooming in and zooming out.

Here lies a profound truth: plunge too deeply, and one risks drowning in an ocean of particulars; rise too far above, and one is alienated from the subtle texture of a single leaf. Scholars tend to be precisionists, pleasured by the depths of detail. Spiritualists tend to be essentialists, rising to the ultimate, or getting to the ‘bottom line.’ The danger of scholasticism is to become so engrossed in detail that the larger contextualisation and conclusiveness never occurs. The danger of religion may be to grasp at the “big picture” so swiftly that we neglect the patient investigation that reveals the beauty of expression and hidden meanings that charm the heart. We reach the conclusion but forget to relish.

When the scholar and the spiritualist converge, zooming in and zooming out, it’s a match made in heaven.