04 Jun The Stories We Keep Believing
We were kayaking in the afternoon, letting the river carry us gently. I had stopped paddling, watching the banks, when I drifted too close and got caught in a set of branches.
I used my oar to push myself free and ducked under a low limb that arched over the water. It split in two, and between those branches was a web. The web was wide and layered and intricate. Easy to miss unless the light hit it just right.
It was filled with insects. Hundreds of them, layered and tangled among twigs and dried leaves.
But there was no spider.
It must have been gone for a while. The web was worn in places, stretched thin in others. And yet, it was doing exactly what it was built to do. Catching whatever passed through.
How interesting that something from so long ago, abandoned and no longer needed, could still work so effectively.
It’s not so different from the way our minds work. The filters and lenses we see things through don’t feel like something we created. They feel true. The way things are. The way people are. The way we are.
But they begin somewhere.
Sometimes it begins with something small. Someone says we are a lot. Or not quite enough. Too outspoken. Or too quiet. And something in us holds onto it, begins to build around it.
At first, it is barely there. A few thin strands stretched across an experience, something we could pass through without noticing.
But over time, more gathers.
Two people make plans without us, and it fits neatly into the sense that we are not someone people think to include.
Someone interrupts us mid-sentence, and it lands as confirmation that our voice is easy to overlook.
Plans fall through at the last minute, and it strengthens the feeling that we are not a priority.
Someone else is chosen or recognized, and it confirms the sense that we fall just short.
What began as a way of understanding becomes a way of seeing.
The spider is gone, but the web remains.
The original moment has passed. Even the version of us who first tried to make sense of it has changed.
But the structure is still in place. It keeps working.
It keeps shaping what moves through our lives now, pulling it into the same pattern, until it begins to feel less like something we built and more like the way things are.
How easy it is to keep drifting past it, never quite seeing it for what it is.
Unless the light shifts.
Unless you are willing to look again, from a different angle, and ask what might still be catching here—
and question whether it has ever really been true at all.