Your Life Is a Symptom of Your Language

Every moment, I am feeding. I feed my eyes, my ears, my nose, my mouth, my skin. I feed my understanding, my current beliefs, my perspectives, my conversations, my values. I also feed my ignorance, and by ignorance I mean nothing derogatory. Ignorance is what is ignored in favor of the current thing. Right now there are swallows outside my window arguing over a birdhouse I put up a few days ago. When I watch them, I am choosing to ignore this page. When I write this page, I am choosing to ignore the swallows. Ignorance is a choice of focus, nothing more. It gets dressed up as a failing because a failing can be feared, and fear is useful to someone. It is not useful to you.

Here is the structure underneath. What you feed yourself arrives in your language. Not eventually. Directly. The words you use are the receipt for what you have been eating. Listen to anyone describe their week and you will hear the diet: what they watched, what they rehearsed, what they blamed, what they claimed. The vocabulary is the inventory.

And the language does not stop at describing. It governs. Your words author the cognitive patterns that quietly organize your behavior and your outcomes. Say “I always end up like this” often enough and watch your decisions arrange themselves to keep the sentence true. The sentence was not a report. It was an instruction.

So the question is not whether your life reflects your language. It does, the way a symptom reflects a condition. The question is who is writing the sentences. I eat my apples because of what I understand about my apples. I know what they do for me, and that knowledge feeds the understanding that chose them. The loop is that tight. Feeding, understanding, word, act, outcome, and back around.

Try this. Take one sentence you say about yourself regularly. Write it down exactly as you say it. Now ask what it feeds. Not whether it is true. What it feeds. If the answer is a pattern you would not choose on purpose, you have found a place where the pen has been moving without you.

What is recognized can be claimed. What is claimed is owned. What is owned can be authored. You are as you say. So you say, so it is.