When you finish a project, a conversation, or a hard season of life, there's a quiet pull to assign it a clean meaning — to say what it was 'really about.' The 13th-century Sufi thinker Rumi resisted this instinct in an unexpected way: he described the soul as a reed cut from its original bed, and insisted that longing itself — not resolution — was the carrying medium of wisdom. Separately, the psychologist George Kelly's successor in personal construct theory, and more pointedly the narrative therapist Michael White, noticed that people tend to 'thin' their own stories: they collapse complex, multi-stranded experience into a single dominant plot and quietly discard the episodes that don't fit. What Rumi and White together suggest is that the meaning you settle on too quickly is almost always the meaning that costs you the least. The richer interpretation usually requires sitting inside the unresolved feeling a little longer — not to wallow, but because the discomfort is still carrying information you haven't decoded yet.

Name one thing from the last year you gave a tidy meaning to — and identify one episode from it that didn't actually fit that story.

Drawing from Sufi Mysticism / Narrative Therapy — Rumi & Michael White