‘Meaning Maker’

‘Meaning Maker’

A bright spring morning, as crisp as any I have experienced, I love the early morning, quite, still, untouched and as I walk to the bus stop I am in my own world; thoughts are drifting in and out of my mind; pictures, words and feelings building a nice little map of how the day, the week and even the year might turn out.

‘Ah’! I am violently shaken from my revelry as I hit the gravel pathway with a thud! ‘Who left that there’? Some absentminded sociopath had thrown a banana skin away and on the floor it had waited for me.

Later that evening when Diane, my wife, would get upset with the mess I had made of my trousers I would have an excuse, ‘it was not my fault’, it was that ‘sociopath’ who threw the banana skin away, at a push I could just blame the banana!

Musing on that banana got me wishing, what if ‘meaning’ it’s self could just shed a skin for me to slip on. Then as I looked at ‘meaning’ I could blame ‘it’ as if it was some thing real.

In order to live in this world everybody needs ‘a map’, a map of reality that helps him or her walk ‘this path’ called life. This map in our head is not exactly the same as the territory; it only represents the road we are on, the life we lead, the meanings we attach to the things that happen to us in life.

The ‘maps in our minds’ are not real, even though they feel very real indeed; we are the meaning makers, words are the colours we use to paint the maps we live by, but words are just words, on their own they mean nothing; like ‘hooks’ we hang on them experiences, memories and feelings, these in turn drive our actions and behaviours in the ‘sense world’. Alfred Korbizicky the founder of General Semantics (1941), coined the now famous phase ‘the map is not the territory’ to highlight this ‘truth’.

We are all doing the best we can with the resources we have, always seeking the best way forward in line with our mental representations of what we think the world is all about.

As maturing people we want to generate an internal map of reality that approximates the ‘sense world’ closely enough to facilitate excellent, exuberant, fun filled, deep, thrilling, productive (etc) living; we are on a quest for multiple choices for each challenge we face! It does not really need saying that the quality of our living is dictated to by the quality of our internal mapping. Taking responsibility for the meaning that I make of the things that happen in my life is fundamental in my quest for maturity in this meaning making 'walk of faith' called life.