Malleable Meaning

I read an article this morning about how we humans make meaning. The way we interpret what we experience affects the meaning we experience in our lives. Because we interpret everything we experience through the brain networks created through our lifetime experience, in a way we create our own reality.

Malleable Meaning

Though meaning is not infinitely malleable, it’s much more malleable than most of us think.

For the most part, meaning-making is automatic and outside your awareness. When you were a child, other people curated the environment that wired experiences into your brain, seeding your brain’s internal model. You’re not responsible for this early wiring or the meanings it engenders, of course, but as an adult, you have the capacity to challenge those meanings and even change them. That is because your brain is always tweaking its internal model, creating the opportunity for new meanings with every new ensemble of signals it encounters.

   — Lisa Feldman Barrett, Are You a Spectator to Reality? Or Are You Its Creator

Although our eyes allow us to see the world around us, it is, in reality, our brain that “sees” because it is our brain which interprets the signals our eyes send to it. Everything we experience is seen, heard, and felt through a particular perspective — based upon how our brain has become wired to perceive.

But the brain’s perception is not carved in stone. It changes based upon physiological and psychological changes. So nothing we experience is “real” in one sense, because it is all experienced through the particular wiring of one’s brain in a particular moment.

You cannot experience the world, or even your own body, objectively. Your experience is always from a particular perspective, and no perspective is universal.

   — Lisa Feldman Barrett, Are You a Spectator to Reality? Or Are You Its Creator

This notion can feel either frightening or freeing, depending upon how you choose to look at it. For me, as a photographer, who has been focusing on seeing beauty, it is freeing. In my experience, the more that I have deliberately chosen to see and seek beauty in the world, the more beauty I experience. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle, ever expanding.

I believe that my efforts to meditate and become more present are also changing the way I perceive the world. The little bits of space between perception and meaning-making, allow a tiny window of opportunity for changing the wiring of my brain. Perhaps I can become less reactive, less judgmental, more open and allowing.

Perhaps you might consider how malleable meaning really is. And leave some space in your own life between perception and meaning-making, allowing that there is no one true reality.

May you walk in beauty.

Note: more photos from Lakewood Cemetery.