Time was, difficult material, complex topics, or just plain stubborn disciplines needed to be reviewed, analyzed, explained, interpreted—in other words, figured out. Sooner or later, you’d get the gist of it, giving you the full right to say, like the cool kids of yesteryear, “I grokked it!”

These days, there is little talk of explanation or analysis. It seems that a non-obvious topic or layered material is only ever ‘unpacked’.

Are you looking at a multi-variable graph that doesn’t lend itself to immediate interpretation?

Has someone just flabbergasted you with a multi-prong marketing strategy wrapped in a 125-page skin?

Are you eyeballing a bit of clickbait on Business Insider summarizing the stirring story of an intrepid freelancer who quit her corporate soul-suck and stuck it to The Man by magically birthing a freelance practice clocking in at $34K of cold-hard a month in exchange for just 20 hours a week of socially conscious toil?

Would you like to repeat her feat, and just need to know how it’s done?

Let us ‘unpack’ it for you.

Call me squeamish, but I wouldn’t let anybody I didn’t know unpack my carry-on case, much less create clutter in my head by dismantling the Lego pieces of some carefully assembled mental construct.

Sure, ‘unpack’ sounds logical enough: something—like proteins, for the hobbyist microbiologists among us—was carefully folded and fitted into a particular pattern and place in order to play a specific role in the workings of a larger entity. Yet when a physician looks, listens, and probes you during that annual medical, or when a professor at a medical school explains an organ or system, they don’t unpack any part of you—or it.

Instead, they delve into the subject at hand, explore its various avenues and alleys, arteries and capillaries; they follow unexpected yet fascinating tangents, find their way back, regain command of the matter at hand, persevere in their attempts to find the elusive thread, and yes—elucidate a complex and mysterious difficulty.

By the oath of Hippocrates, ‘unpack’ sounds so OCD…

I’d rather unwrap a subject in the manner of first-year Anatomy students, who, newly inured to the presence of cadavers everywhere, unwrap a bloody roast-beef sandwich and lay into it with gusto—which is another thing you can do to a topic instead of…

Well, you know.