My neighbor across the street remarked that she hadn't been feeling 100% over the past few days. Not really sick, she explained, but not entirely fully healthy either.
Well, I thought, we're old and that's a pretty normal observation at any time. Plus it is September and the weather is changing; it may take our old bodies a little longer to adjust than it once did. On top of that September is the time when school resumes along with a lot of other programs and activities and when people (other people but people we know) stop taking summer vacations and change the ways they connect with society. So I immediately started a process of mythmaking and hypothesis proposing with the goal of finding a plausible explanation for the experiences of my neighbor across the street.
She herself took a different approach. "I looked back in my diaries," my neighbor across the street told me, "and I found that I had the same experience every year at about this time. So then I felt better."
"You felt better because you felt worse," I offered and we laughed at the absurdity of that truth.
In actual reality what let her feel better was not the unease of the past years but the pattern of the unease. We find events in our lives easier to handle when they can be seen as part of a larger and orderly whole: Yes, I feel uncomfortable now but such a discomfort always afflicts me in September and I know it will pass.
My mythmaking and hypothesis proposing expresses exactly the same urge as her reviewing her diary. Each of us was drawn to seek out a pattern into which current experience can be snugly fit.
Actual reality consists not only in the present experience, the comforts and discomforts of the moments, but also in the context within which we place the present experience: the confidence we have when we can snuggle into the familiar and the dread of uncertainty when there is no familiar pattern.
Now it is September and I relax into the familiar patterns of fruits being offered to the birds and beasts, of leaves turning brown and falling, of warm sunshine receding into coldness. But what if I didn't know about spring?