What Lives in Us

I’ve been thinking more about something I shared earlier this week.

What actually shapes our experience?

I came across something recently about how the brain works. The same parts of the brain that are active when we see are also active when we imagine. Not similar parts. The same. Which makes the line between what is happening and what we experience feel less fixed than it first appears.

It starts to feel like life isn’t just something we observe. It’s something we participate in.

I remember my mom telling me when I was young that I could do anything I put my mind to. She meant it one way. But I heard it another. I took it to mean that I could do anything I could imagine. And that interpretation has shaped more of my life than the sentence itself.

One of my earliest memories is from when I was four or five. I was afraid of spiders. Not just seeing them, but the idea that they might crawl on me while I was sleeping. So every night, lying in bed, I would imagine myself with a little Red Ryder BB gun, going around the room and clearing every spider off the walls before I went to sleep. And then I could sleep.

There were no spiders. But the imagined ones were the ones I was living with. And something about meeting them that way changed the experience.

That memory has been coming back to me because it shows something very clearly. What happens isn’t always what stays with us. What stays is how it lives in us.

We don’t just carry events. We carry the way they were felt, the way they were understood, and the way they continue to move through the body and mind long after they’ve passed.

And in a quieter way, the same thing works in the other direction. We can return to something. Not to change what happened, but to change how it lives. To meet it differently. To allow something new to form around it.

Sometimes that happens through memory. Sometimes through imagination. Sometimes through simply sitting still long enough for something underneath the surface to shift.

You’re not only shaped by what has already happened. You’re also shaped by what you allow yourself to experience internally, even if it hasn’t happened yet.

A memory can change. A feeling can soften. A future can begin to take form before it arrives. And in all of that, something about the present starts to shift.

Because in the end, that’s the part that stays. Not just what happened, but how it continues to live.