Iterating to Understanding

We’ve done many road trips over the years, going as far back to when you were infants. As driver – per family rules – I have total domain over the sound system. Consequently, you all have been exposed to an eclectic (and amazing, if I do say so myself) music catalogue. From the lyric less “oontza oontza” music that drives your mother insane to the piano solos of George Winston and everything in between. These days all of you have your own music accounts and listening devices so you aren’t subject to my whims. However, it wasn’t until this past daytrip to go skiing that I realized how deep that past influence had been.

The mix I was listening was a bit of a throwback one, and Billy Joel was playing. Unexpectedly, and as “Just the Way You Are” was playing, you suddenly shared, “This song makes me think of that happy face on the back of that “Life is Good” shirt you had.” I puzzled for a bit and remembered the shirt you were talking about, a favorite of mine when you were a toddler. And I realized that the view from the back seat caught the top of the back of my shirt, where there was indeed a smiley face. You probably spent hours staring at that spot from all the car trips we took.

The next song on the mix was “Roxanne” by The Police. “Oh, I like this song!” you said as the signature intro played.

“You know what this song is about, right?” I asked, wondering if you understood the subtext.

“Um, no?”

“It’s about a prostitute.”

Your eyes got wide. “Really?” (I think the word you actually said was “Bruh.”) At that point, the line “You don’t have to put on the red light” had just been sung and from your reaction I could see that you got the meaning of it immediately.

“I thought this song was about a car!” You laughed at yourself. “I thought the tile was “Rock Sand”. You know, a red light as in a stop light.”

We laughed together, and as we continued to drive we played other songs you had first and often heard when you were much younger. “Captain Jack” by Billy Joel? “I thought that was about a pirate, not an alcoholic.” I hesitated a sec before asking you what you thought “masturbate” meant, but you replied that that the word didn’t even register at all when you were younger.

We laughed again at the mistakes, and I shared a couple of my own. (For the longest time, I thought “Black Widow Baby” was actually “Black Little Baby”).

But as we drove on and you switched to listening to Taylor Swift (and other artists I wouldn’t recognize out of a lineup), I thought about how we all make meaning from the information we have at our disposal. We hear a song and without the lyrics in front of us, our brain interprets and creates a story as we see it. “Rock Sand” makes more sense than a French women’s name that you had never heard before. A red light has to be a car light or a stop light, the only red lights that you observed in your universe. Makes complete sense.

But later when we have the ability to look at it with a different lens or with additional context, we have the opportunity to reconsider our previous thinking. Rock Sand becomes Roxanne, and the red light through more mature eyes takes on a context that gives the whole song a layer of meaning that was not accessible before. And while the revision in meaning is truer to the artists intent, it doesn’t make your previous meaning completely invalid. At that previous point the song had a meaning to you – not the one that Sting intended, but if you were bopping along thinking about geology and cars, is that any less meaningful?

In fact, this idea of iterating toward a closer version to the “truth” is a built in feature to our education system. We give kids an incomplete understanding of a topic that’s appropriate to their level of capability. We start with whole numbers, then fractions then decimals before we talk about irrational numbers. We teach how to determine areas of regular polygons before having them understand how to integrate a function. Iterating toward understanding is a feature of childhood and adolescence.

However, each iteration relies on our capacity to be open to the fact that perhaps the previous iteration was incomplete in some way. Or completely wrong. We deem that ability of our brain to accept and embrace changes to input as neuroplasticity. And the conventional wisdom is that this ability is especially keen while growing up and that it’s a capacity that diminishes when we get older.

Associated with that notion is that at some point in adulthood, we have somehow reached a full understanding. That we’ve iterated to an understanding of something that’s fully true, or close enough to true as to only reconsider things around the edges.

Being open to the idea that perhaps we are *completely* wrong about something requires a particular humility. It requires accepting that our thoughts are actually separate from *us*. For example, I still hear Steve Perry singing “Clothes On, Clothes Off” instead of “Hold On, Hold On” in “Oh Sherrie”. I can listen to the song ad nauseum with the lyrics in front of me, and I still hear and experience what I thought I had heard when I first heard the song on the radio. But I can’t deny the truth of what the song is. Accepting the truth is different than experiencing a truth, but it requires me to actually recognize that what I *think* is not what is.

It’s odd isn’t it? We go to school and are taught lessons that we are told that are objectively true. Escalating and iterating in complexity and nuance as we age. Ultimately to maybe get to a point that acknowledges the limits of such an approach, and to perhaps accept that there is really no final iteration. If we can accept that learning is an incomplete process, we can remain open to how the world actually is and not be constrained to an outdated understanding.