making sense
fluency and health

Survival depends upon successful interaction with the surrounding environment. As the social aspect of this develops, the communication required grows more sophisticated; and fluency increasingly becomes the core of mental as well as physical well-being.

Even if crippled first children rebel, seeing morality as uncool and history as a picture book of silly people and tired tales. Crazy! Let's do it! Wicked! You're mental!

Children strive to copy what works, building a stability piece by piece; that will endure beneath perception.

Our perception is limited to how far our experience has developed. As Schopenhauer observed, "No man can see over his own height". Born expecting a world that makes sense, we find foundations regardless; and build on them. In endless recursions, our senses match perception.

Scattering light gathers in cells and flashes to brains; adding senses to memories to recognise what we know.

So we need to get the basics right. As Mark Twain said, "You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." Reality makes sense. In the end it's from here we must start.

Life was born in the environment that organisms joined; interpreted as patterns and signs.

Like the floor of a cave, felt in the darkness through a walking stick pressing on the palm of our hand, reality is both imagined and real. Our sense of it comes only from the internal model we construct in order to see. It is created from sensing that part of reality we recognise as significant to us.

As soon as we build our model, we take it for reality; in which all things are set.

It is key to survival to successfully interpret the environment and those lives it contains. As our relationship with that changes, our internal model of it develops according to our perceptions and understandings, right or wrong; good or bad; mad or not.

Always we've existed and evolved as parts, societies, inside and out; incomprehensible when disconnected.

As the social complexity of an environment develops, so too does the complexity of communication within it. Communication is the expression of a relationship with an environment; and understanding this is required to relate and survive in it. Languages evolve.

Twisted together like a moebius band, language is culture and life making signs.

We communicate constantly and unavoidably both in verbal and non-verbal language, expressing our individual culture, of family, neighbourhood, region and state. This makes sense to us; but more importantly it makes sense of us and what we do.

Genes record the changes from drifting, migrating, and mutation; but environment and culture select.

Cultures pattern the environment, both in reality and in our perception. They help us to anticipate the responses of others, and to balance candour with kindness. We are shocked and speechless when we find ourselves somewhere the patterns we know are not shared.

Uprooted, context is lost. Reframed perceptions are skewed, expressions misinterpreted.

To find a sustainable way of being in the society we live in, we are driven to communicate with others. Our well-being depends upon the fluency of communication both external and internal to our bodies. Physically and mentally, we de depend on our making sense.  ►