I don’t know where this comes from, but even our dependence on language seems to be born out of our propensity for categorizing.

We plan and construct and carefully organize. We buy plastic bins to hold our out-of-season clothes, our Christmas decorations, our past selves that we can’t quite throw away. If we have enough, we build castles, or we content ourselves with one in a row of tidy, little cottages. We keep calendars and balance checkbooks. We learn math and logic and how to bring order to everything we touch. We think agency is orderly.

Then there are people. They are messy things more often than not. They open up our neatly kept boxes, reorganize our cupboards, draw out of us our deepest fears and joys. Relationships are really sacred interruptions, more than phone calls or bad traffic. We cannot approach the sacred with sharpies and bankers boxes. Relationships are mysterious things that cannot be boxed and shelved so easily as our memories. They are to be among the most cherished of our posessions. We may approach, as one philosopher put it, with fear and trembling.