The Weaving of Words

The other day I forgot something.

I have absolutely no idea what it was, which seems particularly appropriate for this story, but I remember exactly what I said when I realized it.

“God, I forget everything.”

And then I stopped and thought, Do I?

Do I actually forget everything? Because that would be fairly concerning. I remembered to make coffee. I remembered where I lived. I remembered the dogs needed to be fed. I can remember completely useless pieces of information from forty years ago, including song lyrics, old phone numbers and exactly what somebody said to me in 1983.

Apparently my memory is doing just fine. I forgot one thing. But that isn’t what I said. I said, “I forget everything.” Once I noticed it, I started hearing all the other little things we say during a perfectly normal day.

“Every time. This happens every damn time.”

“Why do you keep doing that?”

“I can never find anything in this house.”

“I’m always running behind.”

“Of course that broke.”

“Here we go again.”

“You know how this is going to turn out.”

None of these statements feels particularly important when we say them. They’re just commentary. Half the time we’re not even talking to another human being. We’re talking to the dishwasher, the computer, the missing car keys or some innocent object that has failed to behave according to our expectations.

But why does something happen twice and suddenly it happens every time? Why do we forget one thing and suddenly we always forget everything? Why does someone leave something where it doesn’t belong and instead of saying, “You left this here,” we say, “Why do you ALWAYS do this?”

Apparently human beings enjoy wildly inaccurate statistics when annoyed. But words are strange little things. Before we say them, they’re thoughts. Something happens, our brain interprets it, we attach meaning to it, and then out comes the sentence.

And once the sentence comes out, we hear it too. That’s the part I think we overlook.

When I say, “I forget everything,” I’ve added another little stitch to the story that I’m becoming forgetful. When I say, “This happens every time,” I’ve taken something that happened today and connected it to every similar thing that has ever happened before. And when I tell someone, “Why do you keep doing things like this?” I’m no longer talking about what they just did. I’m telling them something about who I believe they are.

That’s where the weaving begins.

Not with some giant declaration about our future, but with hundreds of tiny threads we barely notice ourselves laying down.

One probably means nothing. But over time, they start forming a pattern. Some of those threads aren’t even ours to begin with. Think about the things people have said to us over the years:

“You’ve never been very organized.”

“You always lose things.”

“You’re just stubborn.”

“You worry too much.”

“You’re always late.”

Most of those statements probably weren’t delivered as life-altering proclamations. Somebody was frustrated. Somebody was joking. Somebody was tired of waiting for us to find our damn shoes.

But words have a funny way of sticking around. Especially the ones we hear repeatedly. Eventually nobody has to tell us we lose everything anymore because we’ll happily do it ourselves.

“Don’t give that to me. I’ll lose it. I lose everything.”

And there it is. Another thread added to the pattern.

This is where the whole idea of manifestation gets much more interesting to me, because I’m not talking about asking the universe for a yacht and waiting for somebody to show up with the keys.

I’m talking about something much more ordinary.

What if manifestation is happening in tiny ways all the time through the things we repeatedly think, say, expect and eventually believe?

If I keep telling myself I forget everything, I’ll probably start noticing every forgotten thing while completely ignoring the thousand things I remembered. Now I have proof.

See? I told you.

If I keep saying, “Things always go wrong at the last minute,” guess which moments are going to get my attention?

Not the forty-seven times everything went perfectly well. The one time the printer jammed ten minutes before I needed something.

“EVERY. DAMN. TIME.” Except it wasn’t. It happened this time.

That realization made this whole thing a little funny to me because apparently we walk around narrating our lives using some extremely questionable math.

Always.

Never.

Every time.

Nothing.

Everything.

Everybody.

Nobody.

Those are enormous words for the ridiculously ordinary situations we use them to describe. And maybe that’s worth noticing.

Not because we need to become afraid of saying the wrong thing. I refuse to spend the rest of my life worrying that the universe is hiding behind a shrub waiting to misunderstand one of my sarcastic comments.

But I do think there’s something powerful about catching ourselves in the act.

“I forget everything.” No. I forgot that.

“This happens every time.” No. It happened this time.

“You always do this.” No. You did this today, and it annoyed me.

“I can never find anything.” No. I can’t find the damn thing I’m looking for right now.

Listen to the difference. One describes what happened. The other starts building a story about what always happens.

And stories have a way of becoming expectations. Expectations influence how we walk into situations. They change what we notice and how we respond. Our response affects what happens next.

One thread catches another. Then another. And pretty soon we’ve woven ourselves a nice little reality and forgotten we were the ones supplying half the yarn.

Maybe there’s something spiritual happening there too. I happen to believe there is. I believe thought and intention carry more weight than we fully understand, and I believe what we send outward matters.

But even if you remove every bit of mystery from it, the practical part remains. Words affect people. Including the person speaking them.

So I’m trying something ridiculously simple. I’m listening to myself.

Not correcting every sentence or replacing ordinary frustration with fake positivity. If something annoys me, it annoys me. If somebody does something stupid, there is a reasonable possibility I will have commentary.

I’m just paying attention to the words that quietly turn this time into every time, one mistake into a personality trait, one forgotten thing into a failing memory, or one lousy experience into a prediction about what happens next.

Because those are the threads we barely notice. And maybe those are exactly the ones that matter. We’re going to keep talking. We’re human. Silence was apparently never a serious option.

But if our thoughts become words, and our words become part of the stories we tell ourselves and each other, it might be worth listening occasionally to what we’re actually saying.

Especially the little stuff.

Because maybe the universe isn’t only listening when we make some grand declaration about what we want.

Maybe it’s been listening to the running commentary all along. And after hearing some of mine, I may have a few corrections to make.