Meditations on Meaning

A few years ago, in college, my buddy Tom and I went out to our town’s only bar. Once inside, we saw a woman who Tom was interested in. “Watch this,” Tom said.

He tapped the women on the shoulder. She turned around. He smiled. “What happened to your eye?” she said, noticing his black eye.

“I Just won the New England Championship,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “In what sport?”

“I battle,” he said. “I put my life on the line. I’m ready to kill.”

“Oh,” she said again. And though Tom’s descriptions of his wrestling antics have worked before, they didn’t work for this particular woman. She turned toward me. “What do you do?” she said.

“The same thing, I guess,” I said.

“You battle?”

“Well, I think of wrestling more as a philosophical engagement,” I said. “I try to deduce a series of logical next steps, and then take action based on my calculations of balance, technique, and sense – intuitive sense – about how the other person moves.”

She laughed. “You must get your ass kicked,” she said.

“Actually, he just won the New England Championship too,” Tom said, reluctantly.

“How can one person battle while another pontificates?” she asked. “Those are two different things.”

“They’re not,” I said. “Just different interpretations of a similar experience,”

“Dan’s a little off,” Tom said. “Sorry.”

Then he directed me away from the woman and toward the bar. “Don’t ever spew that philosophy shit again,” he said. “I told you it doesn’t work.”

I looked back at the woman. She winked.

****

In our daily lives, we share common experiences with friends, coworkers, lovers, and random people we cross on the street. But those experiences aren’t as similar as we think or sometimes expect.

A guy and a girl may have intercourse. To her, it’s making love, but to him it’s fucking. A mother may discipline a child. To her it’s good parenting, to the child it’s tyranny. Two startup founders may work toward the same vision. To Dan, that vision is about people. To Wilford, it’s about technology.

People rarely get the same thing out of a shared experiences. We all have different needs, different perspectives, and thus we have different vocabularies for understanding and describing our experiences.

These differences are often cited as the reason relationships don’t work. “We just weren’t on the same page,” a girl might say. “My mom doesn’t understand,” a child might say. “Our vision doesn’t seem to be compatible,” Wilford might say. But that’s an easy out. And it’s oftentimes wrong.

Such differences can be precisely the reason relationships do work. “If I didn’t focus on the technology and Dan didn’t focus the people, our vision and our work would be much more limited,” Wilford recently explained to a hot woman at a bar.

And unlike that woman Tom and I talked to years ago, she wasn’t surprised by our contrasting vocabularies. “Of course,” she said. “It’s like viewing a Monet. To fully experience the genius of his paintings, you must look at them up close and from afar.”

Wilford smiled. “I love Monet,” he said. “But I think that looking at his paintings from afar actually ruins the experience…”