Context Matters

Do not pen strokes have meaning within letters. Do not letters have meaning within words? Do not words have meaning within paragraphs? Do not paragraphs have meaning within stories?

The idea here is that symbols have different meanings as they’re nested within language. Context is as important as the actual words.

Isn’t your experience like that, too?

You can only describe your experience through a collection of frameworks. Nothing ever stands alone. Nothing can exist in a vacuum-- not even your own experience

Deciding to separate one thing from another is a human invention. It’s your own way of making sense of the world. But in describing your own experience, you must relate it to a context.

If you say, “It’s warm outside”, how can you ever know that unless you compare it to “not warm”? If you say, “this feels good”, there’s always an underlying implication that something else may feel “not good”.

It’s easy to trick yourself into thinking you have the final say in describing your experience, but you can only ever describe it compared to something else (whether implicitly or explicitly).