Meaning Making Machines

We are constantly making meaning of the world. Our meaning drives our story. Our story drives our perception. Yet, our capacity to make meaning can often lead us astray; it can lie to us. We are awful at remembering what truly happened in the past. Our brains like to create neat and tidy stories so that we cleanly understand what happened, but much of life isn’t neat or tidy.

We live in stories. We create them, share them, and pass them down. Stories connect us. They bind our being. Yet, stories can exaggerate. They can cause us to go off course and move in the wrong direction.

My mentor often said, “Do you have the story or does the story have you?” That’s stuck with me. If we want to change the story, we have to develop our meaning-making machine. We have to become more aware of how we interpret the world and how it alters how we see it. Wrestle with your meaning-making machine. Question it. Do the work on the front end so that your story is as close to the truth as possible.