Distinguishing Sense-making & Experiencing 🚴‍♀️

Here’s a thing I see a lot: People share their opinions about what’s happening, how they’re making sense of the world, what they see going on. And then they don’t get why people don’t feel close to them. 

They learn the proper sentence-stems to talk about their feelings; they’re better at saying 1st person instead of 3rd person; this gives them some inroads, but they’re still getting the same feedback. What’s happening?

They’re showing how they make sense of the world out there, but not how they experience themselves in here. 

There’s intimacy in sense-making. I think healthy relationships have both, plus a whole lot more. I’m sharing my sense-making now, and I feel confident and vulnerable about adopting this role and being seen this way by y’all. But making-sense-of is different from experience, and the world outside is different from experiencing inside. Inviting you into my experiencing-inside as it’s happening, that’s where the magic of relatefulness lies. That’s where people see and feel seen, hear and feel heard, and inevitably discover the wild lovability and paradoxical unity-reflection of everyone’s utter uniqueness.

This is not about thinking versus feeling; you can experience thought and you can make-sense-of feeling. You can’t learn sentence stems or rules to do it either—or you can, but they’re training wheels, and tricycles are fun but you’ll never have the grace, elegance and practicality of the bike until you risk the uncertainty of failure, wobble a bunch, and let others in not just to witness you as a separate individual, but to wake up to our interconnection in the raw, unfinished wholeness of this moment’s imperfection.

Oh also, I don’t recommend using this distinction to try to make someone else share how they experience themselves. Ironically, you’ll be sharing your sense-making :)

With love, Jordan