You built what you know

Jean Piaget was a Swiss biologist who, in the 1920s, started watching his own three children with a scientist's patience, and spent the next fifty years showing that children don't absorb knowledge. They build it. A baby who drops a spoon from the high chair forty times isn't being difficult. She's running an experiment on gravity, and she'll keep running it until she's sure.

Piaget mapped stages: the infant who knows the world through the senses and action; the young child who can use symbols but not logic; the school-age child who can reason about concrete things; the adolescent who can reason about ideas. Each stage builds on the one before, and you can't skip. His bigger claim was about how knowing works at all: we have mental structures, he called them schemas, and when the world fits them we take it in, and when it doesn't we either bend the world to fit or rebuild the structure. Growth is the rebuilding.

Why it opens this stretch of the Meaning chamber: because meaning is a schema. The frame you've been using to make sense of your life was built, by you, out of experience, mostly before you could choose. Piaget's news is that you're still building, and that the moments when the world doesn't fit your frame are not failures. They're the only moments the frame can grow.

A hundred and six days of a log is a record of the world not quite fitting. The number was higher than you thought. The walk changed your mood more than expected. The person you wrote about didn't act as you predicted. Piaget would say: those are the places you learned something. Everything else was just confirmation.