Meanings That Change With Time

August 28, 2013

Today I had an amazing time in our dialogue with Bert. We reread a quote by Michael Oakeshott that we had read last year, and I found it to be a very enlightening experience. One of the things that surprised me the most was how I found so much more meaning in the quote than I had the first time we read it. The first time I saw it I remember thinking that it was a really nice quote and we discussed it, and at the time I thought the dialogue we had about it was great. But now having reread it and having all of my experience at the MPC behind it, it was much deeper and more moving. I think that something like what the quote is trying to transmit happened to me. Between the first time I read the quote and now, I learned new things and had more experiences, and these made me respond to the `occurrence´ of reading the quote a different way and made me give another meaning to the quote. I didn’t know that my impression of a quote like this could change in a relatively short amount of time.

Another thing that shocked me and I failed to grasp the first time I read it, is that the world we inhabit is the one we understand; it doesn’t matter how the rest of the people see the world, we can only see it in our own way. This is something that at first might seem so obvious, but once thinking it over a bit it becomes kind of scary. We can’t change our view of the world, we can’t have more than one perspective; we will always have our own perspective and our own meaning for things. And on top of this we can only see the world through our human perspective, even if there could exist another one. And all of this because we can only give our own meaning to things or occurrences; because we respond to occurrences differently. This is because each one of us learned things in a different way, with a different meaning, with a different past behind us. We all see everything because of our past. In other words, the world we know has been made entirely by ourselves. We all have a unique view and understanding of the world.

What I also learned from the dialogue is that even though our past is behind us, our past is always inviting us to new interpretations of it, to a new way of seeing it, it calls for refinement. As we are constantly learning and experiencing thing, our meanings can change. Just as my interpretation of the quote changed after my second time reading it, my past can also change if I look back on it and try to interpret it. One of my classmates (or Bert) said that sometimes, when we look into our past, things that we thought to be sad in the moment turn out to be joyous.  And here comes one of my great discoveries of today, the importance of documentation. It is important to document our feelings, our thoughts, our learning each day because it is an easier way to go to our past, to relive our history, to reinterpret it, and possibly to learn something more from it. They documentation gives us an easy way to access our past and to have a better picture of it. With this also comes the task of documenting correctly. I noticed how important it is to document thoughts and feelings. Last year, most of all, I documented what went on in my daily life at the MPC, never really worrying much on how certain things made me feels or of certain thoughts I had. Now I notice that it is also important to document these, because it gives me a chance to reevaluate the situations and understand them better. Now I know for certain that each time I go over my documentation, it is an invitation to interpret my past at the MPC and give it greater value.