Look for Lessons

This episode is about learning how to read life well: noticing meaning in ordinary things, then testing whether the meaning we found is actually true, useful, and honest.

This episode pairs with the opening reading: Introduction.

Scott's Introduction

On Sundays at my house, growing up in Southeast Idaho, my dad would often ask each of us what we learned at church that day.

One day, after telling a story about a swallow defending her nest from a red-tailed hawk, he encouraged us all to look for life lessons in everyday things.

It seemed pretty simple for such dramatic effect. Intrigued, and always looking to please or impress my father, I watched for months but saw nothing.

Then one night I went to see a symphony concert at the Assembly Hall in Salt Lake City. In the light of the sunset, the stained-glass windows came alive for me. When the sun was gone, they went dark and dull.

I thought how love and kindness shining through us makes us bright, happy, and attractive like the sun shining through those windows, but if that light goes dim, and we become selfish and self-centered, our countenance is dulled.

I continue to draw life lessons from everyday events. I also encourage readers to look for the encouraging, enlightening lessons in the challenging and mundane of your own lives.

Charlie's Response

Dad's ability to pull wisdom from the mundane has always amazed me, and like my brother over time it worked its way into how I process and view the world. I even categorize metaphors in my head as I go about life as Red Tailed Hawks. Except where Scott was painfully aware of his analogies falling short, I fancied every vague connection I came across an allegorical tapestry of wisdom. I'm not even sure if the sentence before this is the proper use of all those words, but if not, all the better to illustrate my point.

It's possible this is a personality flaw, but it's not something I'm alone in. German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad called it apophenia, the ability to perceive meaningful connections in random data, or its friendly cousin pareidolia, things like seeing faces in clouds, animals in wood grain, or an even sadder version of Marvin the depressed robot from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the back of a family SUV.

What's really cool is you can actually see those ah-ha moments on a brain scan as the brain lights up when connections are made and we feel that sense of elation.

I've spent most of my life since I was old enough to contribute anything chasing that feeling, primarily as a troubleshooter and team lead, and eventually also as a data analyst, which is either the perfect job for a soft-hearted pattern hunter or a deeply ironic form of poetic meanness. Because data does not care about my feelings.

One of the ways this shows up is in the old rule that correlation does not equal causation. In other words, you can have a true pattern and a false explanation at the same time. The line on the chart can be real, and the story you tell about it can still be nonsense.

We're storytelling machines. That's how we're wired. But it's important that the patterns we're looking for don't just track logically; they have to contain useful truths that make us better in some way.

Here is the invitation, in the spirit of Dad's challenge:

• Look for lessons in everyday things.
• Then, when you find one, hold it up to the light.
• Ask if it makes you kinder.
• Ask if it makes you more honest.
• Ask if it makes you more capable.
• Ask if it actually matches reality, or if it just happens to rhyme with a fear you already had.

Stories can save us. They can also trap us. The difference is not whether we make meaning. The difference is whether we make good meaning.