Orders of Abstraction

It feels like I am living my life one level removed from reality right now. It's not true, just a feeling. The stuff I am dealing with right now-- plane tickets and tax season and scheduling-- are completely real. Most people spend much of their lives at this level... But it feels artificial and unimportant.
It has been two years, give or take a month, since anyone tried to kill me. And that wasn't much of an effort, really, nor was it personal. But it felt real, infinitely more real than tax season at a small business.
In the 'ohno' moment, everything is what it is. Exactly what it is, no more and no less and no other. You see and you act, and every interpretation or memory or 'woulda coulda shoulda' thought is a distraction that can get you killed.
You see. You act.
Nothing more. If you do it right, you walk away. If you don't, you just become a piece of someone else's story.
When you think about it afterwards or debrief it, no matter how practiced you are in the AAR, you are removed from the event by a whole order of magnitude. It is a thing of memory now, something that happened. No longer a thing of fear and immediacy.
When you try to extrapolate the lessons (which is the sacred duty of all operators) you are yet another order of magnitude removed. Ten times as abstract. Trying to put or derive intellectual lessons from an event of meat and adrenaline.
Teaching is yet another order of magnitude removed.