When the Same Chapters Tell a Different Story
At almost the same time, I was considering another question about order. During the editing of Paradise (re)Discovered, my editor, Sonia, asked whether two early chapters might work better in the opposite order. The draft sequence moved from “Dreaming Our Reality” to “The Illusion of Needs” and then to “The Strangers We Call Family.” Sonia asked what would happen if the family chapter came first.
I reread the opening chapters in that proposed sequence and saw the material differently. Chapter 1 introduces the patterns through which we construct our experience. Placing the family chapter next lets the reader look toward some of the earliest places those patterns formed before moving into the ways they continue through adult relationships. The chapters themselves remain the same, while their sequence changes what becomes visible between them. I began to notice that making sense of change in our lives often works much the same way.
Making Sense of Change After the Fact
While an experience is happening, we know something about what came before and very little about what will later surround it. We interpret with partial context because that is the only context available. Years later, a move may look different because of what became possible afterward. A relationship may also be understood differently once we recognize patterns we were unable to see while we were inside it. Making sense of change often continues long after the event itself is over.
I can see this in my own move from Santa Fe to Querétaro. Some parts made sense to me at the time, while others only began to make sense after I had lived here long enough to see what followed. The facts remain the same, and later knowledge changes the context in which I hold them. A decision that once seemed isolated may eventually be understood in relation to another decision made years later. Time supplies information that was unavailable to the person who first lived the experience.
We understand from where we are, with the knowledge available to us then. An earlier interpretation can make sense on its own terms. Later experiences can give an earlier event a different place in the story without erasing the person who lived through it. I have found this one of the stranger parts of making sense of change: sometimes I am revising the meaning of something that happened years ago even though nothing about the event itself has changed.
There is a temptation to turn this into a neat story in which everything happens for a reason and eventually finds its assigned place. I experience something messier. Some events remain unresolved, and some continue to carry more than one meaning as the years pass. A later understanding can coexist with an earlier one, especially when both reflect something that was real at different points in a life. Making sense of change can mean holding those different understandings without forcing them into one final explanation.
What Arrives Changes What We Notice
Frida and Georgia offer a much smaller example. Their arrival entered the life already happening in this house and altered what I notice inside it. The desk where I work is still the same desk, yet now I look for a gray kitten before moving anything on it. A chair is still a chair, although I approach it differently when there may be a sleeping kitten nearby. The physical rooms are familiar, and my attention inside them has changed.
Their presence has also brought practical work into the day. They need food and veterinary care, and I have to notice whatever their curiosity discovers before they do something unwise with it. Care changes the rhythm of a household because another life now has to be considered when ordinary decisions are made. This has become part of making sense of change for me as well. Welcoming something new changes how time and attention are used.
This is one reason I have become cautious about asking too quickly what a new development means. We often want an answer while we are still standing close to the event. Sometimes I do not understand a change until enough has happened afterward for me to see it from another point in my life. The event may stay exactly as it was. My understanding develops because later experience gives me more context.
The Story We Have While We Are Living It
Sonia’s question about the chapters gave me a simple way to think about this. Reading the same chapters in a new order changed what I noticed about each of them even though the sentences were still the same. A later chapter can affect how an earlier one is understood because the reader carries information that was unavailable before. A manuscript can be reordered at will. A human life moves forward, so our revisiting happens from later points in time.
That revisiting is part of making sense of change. We remember an event with information our earlier self did not have, and sometimes the relation between experiences becomes easier to see. The earlier interpretation may have been the best understanding available then. Another understanding can become possible later without invalidating the first. We are continually making meaning from a story whose later chapters remain unknown while we are living them.
Frida and Georgia have been here only a short time. I do not know what their arrival will come to mean in the life of this house, beyond the immediate facts that there are now two kittens underfoot and my days require some adjustment around them. For now, I am less interested in deciding what this new chapter means than in noticing what their arrival is changing. Is there an experience in your own life that you understand differently now because later events changed its context?
With care,
Mark
Writing from home in Querétaro