I was definitely not making sense today. It took me three goes to write my email address down correctly on a form. Twice I made a start and got confused between my work and personal addresses. Twice I wrote nonsense. But even when we state that we are not making sense, actually we are always making sense all the time (except maybe for Talking Heads (excuse the 80’s joke :-) ).
Humans are designed as sense-making beings. Although we often hail objectivity as something to be aspired to and attempted we can never be truly objective rather we have woven together a screen of sense-making through which we experience our world.
Our brains are busy and lazy, dealing with a vast amount of information having to sort and prioritise in the blink of an eye. Our brains quickly prioritise safety and belonging, and so often our sense-making thoughts will be focussed on those priorities. This sense-making is about categorising, generalising, grouping and making connections, and of course, we prefer things that connect with what we know already. As we are out and about in our world, seeing, experiencing, thinking and feeling, our mind is interpreting, explaining and simplifying. From very early in our life we are making sense of our experiences. This sense making helps us develop ideas and beliefs around our own identity, how the world works and consequently how we relate to others.
Throughout our life we keep adding experiences, events, thoughts, feelings, we keep weaving and developing the screen of interpretation through which we see the world. We are making sense of things, but often that is through the screen of the sense that we have already made. We explain things in ways that support the sense we have already made. When I wrote a nonsense email address I found myself trying to explain why that might have happened, I hadn’t slept well, I was stressed, I have peri-menopausal brain fog. There was dissonance between my idea of who I am (a competent, intelligent, ‘get-it-right’ type person) and my forgetfulness that had to be explained in a way that left me still feeling competent. We can continue like this building screens of identity, beliefs about the world and how we relate to others looking at the world from the ideas we have built up and explaining away things that don’t fit.
Until something big happens that doesn’t fit into the ideas and beliefs that have served us all these years.
The reality of the world bursts through the screen that we have woven. Positive or negative events or experiences are suddenly too big, too bright and too overwhelming to be contained by our existing ideas and beliefs. The dissonance is too great to just be excused away. This reality that we couldn’t imagine or explain demands a rethink of our ideas about the world, ourselves or others. For many our experiences during the global pandemic have had this effect. We begin to feel lost and unsettled, we don’t know what’s what anymore. When the harsh reality of the world challenges our ability to make sense of everything through our existing screen, we need to bring sense-making from our unconscious automatic processes and into our active awareness. We need to actively and creatively decide how we are going to make meaning out of what occurs. We get to decide the pattern that we are going to weave in our screen. As Victor Frankl says “Individuals are free to choose the meaning they ascribe to a situation, including the most tragic.”
Christina