Synthetic: Logic (of a proposition) having truth or falsity determinable by recourse to experience; eg., snow is white. Compare with analytic; eg., all bachelors are unmarried.
Synthesizing means combining different elements, ideas, or information to create something new and coherent. It’s a higher-level thinking skill that involves more than just summarizing or restating information from various sources. Instead, it requires identifying connections, relationships, and patterns among those sources to form a new understanding or perspective.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are all products of synthetic logic or synthesizing. Most often unwittingly – by the mere strength of our experience and the enforced absorption of those changing spheres of thought and activity – we create new and alternate comprehensions, insights and outlooks. To resist the evolution – or synthesis – is impossible. Any attempt to do so is imperilled both analytically and empirically.
The good news however is that we have a built-in accommodation; that is, an adjustment or acclimation (albeit of varying capacity). Furthermore, the adaptation is of necessity both inevitable and instructive. We build on change; we discover new options; we grow.
Nonetheless overcoming existing patterns of behaviour and thought is not without its challenge. Its most formidable obstruction is that its lingering mosses and barnacles only contaminate the new perspective. Rising above the former posture is often equivalent to attempting to walk backwards – a strait which sadly means only backwaters as convincing as the past may be in one’s (dubious) memory. Awakening to new possibilities is however an adventure reminiscent of the former transition from younger years to the present – that is, excitement and novelty. It is illogical to presume that nutrition for growth lies only in what we have as often as not done only coincidentally (that is, without any particular foresight or formula in mind). It does of course mandate a degree of ingenuity to override resistance to and reinterpretation of change. Keep in mind too that the etymology of resistance is not, as one may be inclined to imagine, to repeat a stand, rather it is to stand against a proposition.
from re- “against” (see re-) + sistere “take a stand, stand firm” (from PIE root *sta– “to stand, make or be firm”)
Conjoined with this qualification is the further strategic limitation that as enhancing as our memories (and be assured that is all they are) may be there is no turning back. The consumption of the past has already dissolved whatever ingredients of distinction may have characterized and stimulated them. Regrettably – and in spite of accepting this axiomatic a priori assertion – we often persist to believe that we shall reignite the flames of the erstwhile attraction. But to adopt the metaphor of romance (with which no doubt we’re all familiar) when the flame is out the candle is done. Time to move on.
It is this candid acknowledgment which preserves the hope of buoyancy. It is also the key to open new doors. Looking back only prolongs the anxiety of change and the illusion of loss.
Commensurate to removal from the past is plotting the future. Naturally we are never more distant from either the past or the future than we were a moment ago; but the proximity illustrates the irrelevance of both. It is instead the urgency of the present which forces apart the two, which enables us to escape our fears and to excite our trenchancy. It is a paradox of the present that it is often hidden from view, secreted by clouds of the past which we allow to insinuate the present. Brushing aside those clouds is a matter of purpose and determination which once conceived is the vehicle to riding the atmosphere. One must accept the delicacy of detail, the draw upon the senses, the propulsion of the spirit from within. It’s simple logic.