Games People Play

Since I began rereading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, I’ve noticed coincidences of birds and of John Updike. (That’s two, and I’m barely into the book, so I’m starting a mental list.)

Birds haven’t featured prominently in my life or lexicon, other than their presence in the big tree outside my bedroom, which they’re attracted to in part due to my upstairs neighbors’ feeders. That and sometimes they remind me of The Producers.

John Updike features even less prominently, although that was not the case a few decades back. I devoured most of the Rabbit books, the Bech books, Marry Me, The Centaur, and lots of collected short stories (Too Far to Go, The Music School, etc.), among others.

Some of us have a tendency to perceive meaning in coincidences. As for me, I’ve been there, done that, and thankfully survived reading way too much Carl Jung during my formative years. Now I understand that the conscious part of my brain can only process about 40 bits of information at a time, and what it gets to chew on depends on what the unconscious part of my brain thinks might be useful—or will at least keep the conscious part occupied and hopefully out of trouble.

So the unconscious sifts through the 11 million bits it’s taking in at any given moment and … on the fly, so to speak … funnels a minuscule amount to consciousness, which operates as if it has a … bird’s eye view … of what is going on—and, more importantly, knows what it all means.

Of course, the meaning comes from us, not from what is outside of us. So things mean whatever we believe them to mean, based on our brain’s interpretations. We are, as David DiSalvo says in What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite, meaning makers.

Everything Is an Interpretation

Our experience of reality is a result of our interpretations, and the vast majority of those interpretations come from the unconscious, which is only concerned about meaning insofar as it affects the next action we’re about to take.

However, we treat all of our interpretations as if they are reality, which leads to a very static, literal, and concrete view of the world. And that worldview is affected much less than we might think by looking for and perceiving meaning in symbols, coincidences, objects, and occurrences. Because when we find meaning in those things, we’re operating as if the meaning is fixed within the objects or the occurrences: static, literal, concrete.

It is the unconscious that processes associatively rather than linearly. So it’s the unconscious that links bird with the notion of freedom or hope or anything else. But only if our mental model contains a belief that the appearance of birds means something other than what is apparent. If you’re tempted to consider that the unconscious has some specialized or secret info that it’s accessing, remember that this is the same unconscious that is addicted to pattern recognition (one result of which is stereotyping) and is riddled with cognitive biases (including our all-time favorite, confirmation bias) for the express purpose of being able to quickly jump to conclusions.

Delusional and Disempowering

Ray Grasse wrote a book titled The Waking Dream, which is subtitled Unlocking the Symbolic Language of Our Lives. He quotes Nikos Kazantzakis from Zorba the Greek:

Everything in this world has a hidden meaning. Men, animals, trees, stars, they are hieroglyphics. …When you see them, you do not understand them. You think they are really men, animals, trees, stars.

On the surface, this might be appealing. But there’s so much to unpack in those three sentences, so many assumptions underlying them. At the foundation is the belief that there are specific meanings one can ultimately deduce—again, meanings that are fixed and located within the things of the world. They are there for us to uncover or not.

I take the idea of unlocking the symbolic language of our lives to be another version of the game of finding our life-purpose cheese. There’s no there there.

As it is, life is empty and meaningless and it’s empty and meaningless that life is empty and meaningless. And, hey, we’re making meaning, anyway. We can’t do otherwise. It seems the height (or one height, anyway) of idiocy to fail to recognize that we are the source of the meaning we’re making. It’s somewhat delusional and seriously disempowering.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth reminds us that the color green exists neither in the object we’re viewing, nor in our brain, but in the interaction between the two. In other words, it’s not fixed; it’s an interpretation.

We’re in ongoing interaction with all of the world we inhabit. Both we and the world are in constant motion at all times. Reality is anything but static, literal, or concrete. We’re making it up as we go, and we’re never in the same place twice. A far more interesting series of question to ask is what is my brain bringing to my attention, what meaning am I making of it, and what does this say about who my brain thinks I am?

So what to do with two broken wrists, a bird in my bedroom and the sound of two doors closing? I am a writer, and I keep thinking there must be a connection to make, that these are pieces of a puzzle, that there is some way everything fits together. I’m damned if I know what it is. The more I squirrel around for a meaning, the more reluctant I am to consider the obvious. But the significance of a closing door is not lost on me, and I’ve never felt quite this mortal. It’s a beautiful word, “mortal,” rhyming with “portal,” which sounds optimistic. And really, who wants to live forever? How tedious life would become. Mortality makes everything matter, keeps life interesting. And that’s all I ask. —Abigail Thomas, memoirist