How do I see thee Abstracting

October 17, 2020

The cognitive tool of abstracting allows you to represent a certain topic in one single view point. In Root Bernstein’s (1999) Sparks of Genius, Heisenberg defines abstracting as, “the possibility of considering an object or group of objects under one viewpoint while disregarding all other properties of the object.” This meant looking at courage in one view, while putting all other viewpoints aside. The first abstraction that I chose was a motivational poster, made on Google Slides, representing courage. One idea that sparked my mind was the idea of a holding hand. It is a simple idea as everyone needs courage to face their fears and keep holding on. We need people and things around us to give courage throughout our lifetime.Throughout the world, we are going through pain from the pandemic. Life has not resumed as normal. The pandemic has also given us a new perspective on what it means to be a frontline worker. With all of this said, society needs a helping hand of courage to have friends and family come together safely, to keep holding on and face anything together.

As I thought about courage with this abstraction, I thought about how society needs to be on the same page and communicate as a whole. When we, the people, can get through anything together, we are strong and exemplify the everyday essence of courage. For example, people who are working on the frontlines right now represent courage every day as they are facing the pandemic head on knowing little about it. This motivational poster shows that every day, we are faced with new challenges and need to have courage to survive.

For my second abstraction, I created two TikToks.One with no words to illustrate and abstract the idea of courage and another with words to illustrate courage.This Tiktok represents a slew of heroes, fictional and real, that go through the steps of the hero’s journey. All of these heroes have some form of courage. At first, they go through an “I can’t do it,” phase as they do not believe they can complete their missions or achieve their end goal. They go through hardships and hurdles to get the mission complete and eventually are successful. With this abstraction, I realized that many people and inanimate objects have this idea of heroism and courage within. For example, a tree finds courage through shedding its leaves each fall to rebirth new leaves in the Spring. Abstracting this idea of courage shows that anyone and everyone faces challenges and may have courage.