Part of the meaning and structure we make from the input we get is informed by our experiences. From the time we are born we are gathering data and spinning a life out of it. And this is a good thing otherwise our life would become a weird and very painful version of Ground Hog’s Day where we kept doing things, forgetting that we had already done them and what the ramifications of them were. Think about burning your fingers on a hot stove element every day or several times a day because you never made meaning out of the separate pieces stove/heat/hand/hurt. Life would just be awful, however we wouldn’t realize why because we wouldn’t have made any meaning from the pieces.
However, that’s not usually the case for us (exceptions exist periodically. The prove the rule, right?) and so we make meaning out of a lot of things including our experiences in the world from the physical to the spiritual and everything in between. But what if we’re wrong? What if the meaning that we make is completely off base? Our truth, our understanding of things isn’t necessarily physics. We may think that the structure of our lives is like gravity. It always works this way and it will always work this way unless I take some extraordinary measures to change things like going into a weightless environment. However, that’s not necessarily the case. What if your truth is like Charlie Brown and the football. It has always been this way, but not because it’s always like that, not because it’s like gravity, but because of Lucy and her need, for *pick a reason here* pulls the football out of reach.
That puts a whole new spin on things. If how your life is, the structure you have built, the meaning that you have used to form your identity isn’t gravity, it’s Peanuts and Charlie Brown and Lucy and football, then doesn’t that change everything? It’s not inevitable, there are a great many things about it that can change. Stop playing football. Stop playing football with Lucy. Stop hanging out with Lucy at all. Have a non-violent confrontation with Lucy resetting boundaries around your relationship (trust is off the menu. And you can’t punch her lights out no matter how much you want to, not because she’s a girl, but because you don’t want jail time on your record and violence is never the answer.) Stop living in a cartoon world and take a look at reality. Stop wearing the yellow and back shirt for goodness sake! Question your truths to see what they are made out of and if they are still relevant. They may not be. They are based on past experiences and you’re not that person any more. And if the laws you’ve come to live by aren’t the laws of physics but meaning you’ve built out of experience, perhaps it’s time to use a little scientific method on them and challenge their veracity. You might find that there are new truths out their waiting to be discovered.
