It is often very informative and broadening to look at the etymology of the words you are learning, understanding or defining. Etymology is the basis, the context from which words evolve, consequently bringing their history and their transformed trajectory over the course of cultures and eras. Abstraction, for example, is a word that expresses the process by which ideas are distanced from objects.

When we remember that in Latin abstractum is the past participle of abstrahere and means "to detach, to move away from" or "to pull out", the meaning of abstraction as an apprehension of implicit totalities and configuring processes becomes more meaningful and perfect. This occurs at all levels of perception, of human thought, in any relational context, be it scientific (concept), technical (apprehension of the configurative relationships of mechanizing processes and their functionalities) or artistic (colours informing different densities of the expression of what you want to show, or creating spaces, or strokes replacing and maintaining files). Cave paintings with their insinuated figures, digital language with its emojis, for example, reconstruct stories and make paths and directions possible. In family and emotional relationships, the arched eyebrow and the skewed eye express a lot. It's the abstract that reconfigures, the eloquent silence, the muted speech that shouts and explains.

In order to abstract, you have to stand back. To detach is to leave the dense, explicit configurations exhausted by their signalling limits. The more secure you are - trapped in what is there in front of you — the less you can abstract. It is this characteristic of "going beyond the given", of moving away from the contingent and circumstantial, that anchors abstraction in the realm of the arts, especially painting. It was also this not dwelling on what is considered real as a synonym for dense, causal and explicit that pushed abstraction into the realm of symbol and poetry, thus leading it to sometimes be understood as "explicit subjectivity" and a symbol of named realities.

Abstraction is a constant in our daily lives. Without abstraction, without this distance, without this separation from the data presented, nothing would be understood, except the constant succession of cause and effect. Living and understanding would become mere conclusions of causes that generate effects, mechanization or automatism presiding over all processes. It would be like humanity clinging to what happens, without the possibility of questioning, like the imprisonment resulting from those who cling to one side of a tug-of-war, clinging to the evidence, to what happens. Being on one side, being on the other side, define nothing, nor do they situate or exclude, they only express imprisonment in causes and effects, which are nothing more than aspects, and therefore patrialization of processes. Abstracting, detaching and separating from contingencies and limits immediately makes you realize that the cause of X is the effect of Y, and that the same can be the fragmentary residue of previous summations.

Thinking is not adding or subtracting examples and explanations. Thinking is giving continuity to findings and inferences. Assessments, quizzes or lists are just summaries, they are not the totality they are meant to synonymize. By creating a vicious circle, we become trapped with no way out and thus no possibility of abstraction, and consequently of understanding what is happening, what is occurring. In the creative process, abstraction is a fundamental attitude in order to get out of the mechanics of repetition through addition, through adding up the dice thrown on the podium of realizations. Bound, imprisoned, without separating yourself from what happens, you don't create, you just repeat, you just survive.

Abstraction, this highlighting and separation of dense, situational data, is what allows transcendence, to exist as a being-in-the-world without being trapped in the fabric of the familiar, in the networks of established circuits. Humanity evolves when it abstracts, when it transcends. Simply planting and gathering was transformed and expanded when it was realized that this depended on the sun and rain, for example. Understanding the natural cycle of the rainy and dry seasons guided how to work the land, seeds and harvest. This process, which emphasizes the cause of planting seeds and the effect of plants being born, was the apprehension of the relationships that shape the whole process, without being tied to the initial data — planting — and the final data — harvesting. Breaking out of linearity, out of contingency, separating, highlighting makes ideas, thoughts distanced from the dense aspects that held them back and imprisoned them.

Realizing oneself as the bearer of countless needs, and being able to let go of them, get away from them, expands individual possibilities more and more. Being in the world with the other can be limiting, contingent, as well as integrating, transcendent. To abstract is to stand out, to let go of any limiting factor. The very idea of God, of the absolute as something other than what is experienced and sought after, is the desperate ambition to cling to what is not dense, not objective, but which needs to be attained through faith, hope, prayers, amulets and expectations. To abstract is to remove the shields that prevent the globalized configuration of what is there, of what is evident as a process. To accompany this processual configuration is to understand, to listen to every explanation of what is happening, what is evident, what is happening. It means not falling into Manichaeism, into polarizations that reduce processes. The sciences, the arts, our daily lives tell us this all the time. Life is abstraction, it's overcoming, it's change, it's transformative separation.