The Shape of What We Carry
My air conditioner hasn't worked for a couple of years now,
I’ve been waiting for a good year to sink all that money into replacing it. It
was so hot, this week I couldn’t think. The kind of heat that flattens thought
and makes memory feel like steam. I managed to spend a couple of days by the
lake, to just sit there in the breeze while my kids swam in the water. I had convinced myself there was nothing to
write—no angle, no spark—and yet, that was when something stirred. It didn’t
come fully formed. It moved under the surface like something waiting for
attention. And once I noticed it, like a fever dream, it wouldn’t stop
unfolding: maybe perception is our real mythology.
Not the myths we read, but the ones we live through.
Not the tales we tell—but the invisible shape they take in how we see. Maybe
our sight itself is a kind of myth—a lens of expectations, memory, meaning, and
fear. If so, perception isn't passive. It's active, mythic. A feedback loop
between us and the world, always forming and re-forming.
Without myth, we live in a constant state of busyness and
distraction—an effort to occupy the emptiness. We fill the void with choices,
critics, and opinions. We create motion by purchasing, selecting a color
palette, or picking a sports team. And while in part, this paints the color of
our lives, by itself we cannot navigate our lives meaningfully.
We talk about perception as if it’s a neutral window—like
some clean pane between us and reality. But it’s more like a lens ground from
past experience and held together by feeling, intuition, and sometimes trauma.
What we see is shaped by what we've lived, what we've believed, and even what
we've avoided.
Personal myths—Jung called them that—aren’t stories we
invent for fun. They’re the invisible frameworks we carry: the wounded healer,
the exile, the bridge, the witness. And through those roles, we interpret the
world. Not always accurately, but always meaningfully.
A door becomes an escape. A silence becomes a judgment. A
compliment becomes a threat. None of these things are objective—they are
perceived.
And perception can change. That’s the part that moved me.
Because sometimes we live as though we are stuck with what we see. But then
time stirs, or someone says something that lands differently, or we lose
something—or someone—and our myth gets updated. Not erased, just altered. The
same sun, seen through a different lens, makes a new shadow.
I began to wonder if perception could be thought of as a
kind of system, not mechanical but symbolic. If the way we perceive changes,
could there be a pattern in how that happens? Could there be a structure? Can
we be participants in building that structure, rather than merely being born
into one? Could we track how we evolve in what we notice, fear, or welcome?
Even on days where I feel I’ve made no progress, I find
myself seeing things I wouldn’t have noticed before. That must count for
something. And so, I’ve started thinking of perception not as a reaction to the
world, but as something I build and carry into the world. A lantern,
maybe. A compass. A mythic lens. Sometimes even a shelter.
We move through space, but perception moves through us. It enters each room ahead of us, shaping the meaning of what we find there. The shape of our seeing becomes the shape of our life.
And that is something I can write about. Even in the heat. Because when perception becomes conscious, it’s no longer just what we see—it’s how we live.
To be continued in Part II: The Box Compass of Perception
Related posts:
- The Shape of Perception in Four Parts: Part II
- The Shape of Perception in Four Parts: Part III
- The Shape of Perception: Part IV — Time, Projection, and the Threading Voice (with Shelter Metaphor)
- The Shape of Perception: Part V — The Moral Feedback Loop
- The Common Harmonic Ground: Morality in Myth and Why the Loop is Not Neutral