The world built its safety in squares
and feared the vessel that moved.
But the living truth is never still.
It breathes.
It flows.
It reshapes the lines
that try to contain it.
From my book, The Centre · Seed · Flower · Language · Being
The square isn’t grief, happiness, depression or healing. The square is the structure we have built to make human experience understandable.
Language is one of the ways we construct it.
We are taught very quickly how to explain ourselves. Why we did something. Why we understood something the way we did. We learn to explain our happiness. We learn to explain our grief.
We name something and then, almost without realising it, begin to expect the experience to behave according to the name.
And I wonder whether, in doing that, we have quietly decided how far a human experience is allowed to stretch.
As long as it remains within recognisable boundaries, people know what to do with us.
But what happens when it touches the edges?
When someone’s experience doesn’t behave according to the recognised explanation, somehow the person becomes the thing that appears unusual.
So they explain themselves more.
They search for more language.
They begin to wonder why they don’t fit.
But human experience was never contained. It moves.
And if human experience cannot actually be contained within these squares, but we are taught to live within them anyway, then I think there is a much bigger question.
What are we actually experiencing?
Are we experiencing our lives? Or are we experiencing an acceptable interpretation of our lives?
And what are we actually sharing with one another?
Because if I have already translated my experience into something socially recognisable before I give it to you, and you have done the same before you give yours to me, how much of our actual human experience ever passes between us?
And then I think about children. What are we teaching them?
A child experiences something enormous and fluid and, so often, we give them the word. And with the word can come an entire expectation of what that experience is supposed to look like.
Take grief. Someone says: I’m grieving.
And then the language around grief arrives.
I’m struggling.
I can’t cope.
I’m depressed.
I need to process this.
Why am I still feeling this?
Some of those descriptions may be completely true. Language can help us recognise what we’re experiencing and communicate it to another person.
But who taught us what else to do with grief?
Who taught us: yes, acknowledge this. Don’t deny it. Don’t rush it away. Don’t demand that it becomes something else. But continue feeding the part of you that is alive.
Feed your soul.
Not as a distraction from grief. Not as pretending you’re okay. Not because grief needs to be replaced with happiness.
But because perhaps grief does not need to disappear for something else to be allowed to live alongside it.
And I wonder what we sometimes lose because we don’t believe that.
Do we turn away from something that could nourish us because we think we shouldn’t be allowed to hold it yet?
Do we lose someone we love, or someone we might have come to love, because we decide there isn’t room for them alongside our grief?
Do we say, “I can’t have this in my life right now,” because that is genuinely what we feel? Or because somewhere along the way we learned that grief is supposed to occupy the whole space?
Maybe sometimes we aren’t responding to the experience itself. Maybe we are responding to what we have been taught the experience permits.
We can let grief be grief without asking it to become the whole definition of the person experiencing it.
Feeding the soul is one way we allow another part of our human experience to continue living in parallel.
And that brings me back to the square.
Squares make things predictable. They allow us to name, organise, communicate, diagnose, teach and understand. They give the world safety.
But the vessel — the person — moves.
So if the square was never designed to accommodate the full human experience, why are we measuring the human by their ability to remain inside it?
And if we have to reduce human experience in order for it to fit inside the structures we’ve created to understand it, what exactly are those structures helping us understand?
The human?
Or the square?
