How we react, respond, and reflect on our experiences is crucial to how it’s recorded and then understood. The experience and resulting emotional state become part of a tapestry of experiences that we call “our history.” That history informs all our future behavior and how we find meaning in our lives.
Our experiences as human beings impact more than just our emotional state at the moment. When we have experiences, we immediately try to organize them into meaningful patterns. Those patterns help us navigate our day-to-day life.
Imagine if we had to take notice of every single thing as if it were a new occurrence, we would never learn or be capable of caring for anything but our most basic needs. Developmentally, we would be babies. We wouldn’t understand things like language, facial expressions, or even be able to differentiate between different individuals or the same individual over time.
Language is sound patterned to meaning. Facial expressions are specific movements of features we recognize as meaningful patterns to help us understand someone else’s state of mind. The way we identify others might also be understood as a spatial pattern of characteristics that is unique to each individual. The aging process is a pattern learned over time, as we experience the transformation of people around us.
Much of this happens outside of our conscious experience. It’s worth a glance inward to see what our tapestry of patterns looks like, so we may be more deliberate in how we interact with and understand the world.