The Box That Would Have Vouched for You

I have an essay in the current issue of Telicom — Volume 38, Number 3 — called “The Dimensioned Mind.”

It is about a problem I did not expect to still be thinking about at fifty: what happens to people who cannot be placed in a single category.

The person who presents at an academic conference on Friday, competes in a ballroom event on Saturday, and takes a motorcycle down the coast on Sunday. People want to know which one is the real one, and grow quietly frustrated when no single answer is offered.

For a long time, I read that as a flaw in myself. Too curious. Too broad. Insufficiently disciplined.

The essay is about discovering that breadth can compound. What begins as a collection of interests can become a form of cross-pollination — and if you do the work of connecting the pieces, what accumulates over decades is not a collection of experiences but a web in which each thing changes how you understand the others.

There is a cost to it that I had never named before writing this. Knowledge that arrives in an unexpected package tends to be discounted until someone with a recognizable credential says the same thing.

The box people cannot put you in is the same box that would have vouched for what you know.

Telicom is the journal of the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry, which has been publishing it since 1974. It goes to members, so I cannot link the piece directly — but if the description above sounds like something you have lived, I would be glad to hear about it.