Lately, I’ve been paying attention to the ways we assign meaning to things.
How two people can look at the same object and walk away with completely different emotions and experiences.

Sometimes a book is just a few pieces of paper bound together.
There’s nothing inherently magical about ink pressed into lines.
And yet we sit with certain books as if they’re companions. We underline, highlight, revisit, and let entire paragraphs change how we think about our own lives.

Sometimes a movie doesn’t follow a clear arc or a story; it simply exists.
It resists the rules we expect: no hero’s journey, no tidy ending, no rising tension telling us how to feel. And yet something in it still reaches us. A moment. A glance. A line that wasn’t meant to be the line but somehow becomes the line.

Sometimes, a painting is just brushstrokes of blue against a white canvas.
On its own, it’s pigment and texture. But at the right moment, or with the right person standing in front of it, it becomes hope, or possibility, or calm, or the feeling of being held.

The object doesn’t change.
We do.
Or maybe we let something inside us meet the art halfway.

Meaning is what gives art its pulse.
It’s the thing that lifts creation out of the ordinary and into the personal.
Not because the work demands it, but because we choose to bring a piece of ourselves to it.

And that, to me, is its own form of artistry.
Not just creating the thing, but creating the connection to the thing.
Letting meaning be co-authored between the maker and the person who receives it.

It makes you wonder how much of life works the same way:
how many moments are neutral until we insert feelings,
how many objects are simple until we decide they matter,
how many experiences become memorable because we let them hold meaning.

Maybe meaning isn’t something we discover.
Maybe it’s something we inject.
Carefully, quietly, deliberately.
A tiny act of creation layered on top of someone else’s creation.

And maybe that’s what makes art and life feel alive. And in a way, we’re all creating with the unconscious intention to connect.

— James Burge
Author of The Shape of Ordinary