thoughts about balls of wax
Over the past year, a phrase I’ve become increasingly fond of is that “[something] is a ball of wax.”1
I first heard this phrase in an academic context referring to Substantive Due Process—an area of constitutional law notorious for forcing distinct questions together in elusive ways.2 Its meaning, though not immediately obvious, is rather intuitive—that something is a tangled, messy, blob that cannot be pulled apart easily. At the time, the doctrinal mess of Substantive Due Process left an unfair impression, so I imagined a ball of earwax—so brittle it falls apart under any scrutiny. Only with time did I disentangle the idiom from its origin to appreciate its universal applicability.
The gravamen of this phrase is the argument that when we refer to specific phrases or ideas, intentionally or not, we invoke a whole constellation of ideas and concepts and emotions. With some thought, this should be readily apparent in almost everything.
Consider my initial reaction to the idiom. Though I intended to focus on the idiom and only the idiom, the context it was originally invoked in colored my feelings. The reason isn’t unique to me.3 We don’t always know where emotions come from. When the source is obvious, we name it at once; when it isn’t, we name the most intuitively probable candidate. This reflex is usually correct, but notice how it names what is most probable, which is not necessarily the true source. More importantly, when the two diverge, we often do not distinguish between them.4 We simply feel—and that feeling is a messy ball of wax we lack the tools to cleanly parse. From here, I hope the extension to most things is obvious.
Like many, I have an instinct to analyze and desire to understand, so for a while, I refused to accept that some things cannot be perfectly understood. But over this past year, I’ve found myself wondering why I assumed that understanding more is a virtue. Happiness is not the barometer of worth, but has my refusal to “not know” made me happier? I don’t know the answer to that, and perhaps that’s a question for another time. But more importantly, while clawing and gnashing all the way, I’ve come to accept that life—by its very nature—is a ball of wax. Try as I might, some of it stays knotted and some of it re-knots itself all the same. Until the end, I'll never see the whole of it. And that’s okay.
Ironically, I’m referring to the use of this idiom in the legal context, which is discussed further here. There is a similar layperson’s idiom, “the whole ball of wax,” to mean the “whole thing” but I find that phrase far less interesting.↩
For example, what counts as a fundamental right, how to identify one, what level of scrutiny applies, the role of history and tradition.↩
Or at least, I assume so.↩
An easier way to conceptualize this phenomenon is with food poisoning: fall ill after eating something vile and the culprit is clear; fall ill after eating a fancy buffet and a quick guess is either imprecise or wrong.↩