Meaning in Motion
On coherence, orientation, and the navigational logic of monotropic recursion
I can’t read a physical map to save my life.
I mean, I can. I know how to read scales and symbols, how to follow directions. But when I look at a map, I have no immediate sense of orientation. Every detail sits at the same level. There’s no natural anchor for my mind to lock onto. And I can’t just hold the entire thing at once (if you can, I envy you). I have to consciously pick something and maintain my orientation around it. And that works well enough in the moment. But as soon as I stop actively orienting, that coherence dissolves. There’s no internal picture to reference. The map returns to being everything, everywhere, all at once.
I do learn places. I just learn them by being in them. When I move somewhere new, I learn the roads by driving them again and again. I get to know a route by the timing of its turns, the shape of its movement, the way it feels to go from one point to another. I don’t remember so much what a route looks like. I remember how I move through it. The memory is relational. It’s built in the doing.
When I encounter something new—a road, a building, a face—it arrives without an anchor. I don’t hold the object. I hold where I am in relation to it. Orientation comes from lived context, not stored imagery.
I have visual aphantasia. I can see things internally, but the image is indistinct—like looking through a fogged bathroom mirror, where the outline is there but the details are indistinguishable. Or like driving in heavy rain, when the windshield wipers are working but the world always feels one swipe behind. The shape is present, but it isn’t stable enough to use, to trust. If I try to bring detail into focus, I have to reconstruct it. And even then, it’s temporary. The moment I let go of it, it fades.
What stays is the context. The continuity of having moved through the space. The sense of where I was within it. The memory is positional, relational, lived. Aphantasia didn’t create this way of knowing—it just made the underlying structure impossible to ignore.
This is how meaning forms for me. Through contact. Through staying with something long enough for its shape to show itself while I’m inside it. I don’t hold the world by storing it. I hold it by continuing to be in relation with it.
And this is why I return to things.
When I return to a thought, I’m stepping back into the place where it makes sense. The clarity isn’t kept somewhere—it happens in the act of being with it. The idea has shape when my attention and the thought are present to each other. The orientation is in the relationship itself.
Sometimes when I return to a thought, I can feel the direction it was already going. Not the language of it—just the movement of it. And when I’m back inside that movement, the next part is already there. It isn’t remembering. It’s resuming. The continuity is already there. I’m just stepping back into it.
Recursion, then, is returning to a thought through the same movement that formed it in the first place. It isn’t simply looping or repetition. It’s how the coherence becomes available again. The meaning is steady, and I meet it by returning.
There’s anchoring in that motion. I stay close enough for the shape of the thought to remain in focus, close enough that its direction is still reachable. The depth comes from remaining with it long enough for that direction to show itself again. It’s like rejoining a familiar route after a detour—the orientation returns once I’m moving inside it. The coherence is in the movement, not in something I’ve stored. When I’m in that movement, the shape holds because I’m present to it.
I don’t return to remember. I return to remain in relation. My understanding of the people in my life isn’t something I store and recall later. It forms over time, in the accumulation of being with them, in the way we move together, in the ongoing texture of our interactions. Who someone is to me takes shape through continuity, not through remembered detail.
If I care about someone, the familiarity comes from the lived pattern of our connection—the texture of our conversations, the way we show up for each other, the internal alignment that forms through shared presence. Their place in my life is shaped by experience held over time, not by a static image I can look back on.
I don’t hold people as fixed impressions—I can’t. But I know them through the ongoing shape of the relationship itself. What I recognize is the orientation of being with them—the way the connection settles, the way it moves when we’re in it.
The relationship holds the shape of them. ∞