Bounded

Villain: a mixture between both with a twist of liquor
Chase it with more beer, taste it like truth or dare

• MF DOOM

For any given moment in a person’s life, there is a process between what happens to them and how they react to the happening.

The process as a concept can be analyzed in various ways. How do you react to something?

Ironically, we can understand our reaction to things as boundaries of something. Existentially, you’re reacting to these words based on the boundaries around them, encapsulated in your awareness. Your awareness itself is a boundary encapsulated in a physical world. Our reaction is boundary, too.

What is a boundary? We can only understand a boundary within a concept. As soon as a boundary is drawn, its existence for our understanding is based on a concept that gives the boundary meaning.

We start with meaning. We have meaning within us always. Our understanding of boundary is relative to the meaning we bring into interpreting boundary as part of a concept.

When we’re young, our elders teach us good habits. A boundary in this example is brushing our teeth relative to the time of day. Eventually we get older we appreciate the act of brushing our teeth because of teeth health rather than because our elders taught us to do it and society encouraged the behavior.

The meaning we bring into understanding can be abstract or tied down to the political/social/personal lives that our actions/conditioning existentially belong to.

An abstract level of understanding is this text but it’s a little too abstract. A more practical abstract understanding of meaning is arithmetic. We react to 2 + 2 = 4 as young kids through a basic understanding of relations between numbers. As math gets more abstract, we learn about the axioms that act as the foundation for the mathematical significance of addition. At first, addition is a basic boundary used in everyday life. Later on, we learn that the boundaries of addition can be more technical within more abstract concepts other than our everyday lives.

Whether in our private life or abstract concepts, we all first bring meaning into the boundaries we react to. How we bring meaning into boundaries is something we’ve been conditioned to do.

Naturally, some people are smart and can bring meaning into boundaries in creative ways. But for social concerns, we care more about the common boundaries a society shares. The commonness creates a barrier between people that allows expectations for defining boundaries. The shared expectation allows interaction/inter-reaction where we express ourselves with boundaries based on a meaning we associate with those boundaries.

What meaning do we associate with the boundaries?

Boundaries can come from childhood affection, nostalgia, aspirations, wants. If we take on a formal science or math, the meaning of boundary is based on a communal awareness that expects/predicts interaction/inter-reaction within more dynamic boundaries.

In our personal life, we would prefer a communal awareness that expects/predicts consistent boundaries that maintain a peaceful atmosphere. A peaceful atmosphere that acts as a boundary for others to interact with in a similar way.

Boundaries are things we encounter with meaning. We understand meaning with the boundaries drawn from our interaction with boundaries. We develop boundaries with creativity. Testing and changing boundaries by using meaning in new ways.

Each boundary drawn ripples back to us, defining in part who we are by presenting the first part of the moment where something happens. Where we react to it, we define a boundary. The significance of the boundary is in part something that happens and in part something we do.

Why do we do what we do? The boundary of how we can answer that is based on the concepts we existentially understand. Our understanding can change and our answers can change but the principle of boundaries, concepts and expectations work the same against our meaning.