Events happen. Meaning follows.

A child runs down a path, trips, and scrapes his knee. He freezes, suspended between pain and embarrassment, waiting for a cue. His mother rushes in, alarmed, already narrating the moment as danger. A passerby notices and keeps walking. To them, nothing meaningful happened.

One event. Three interpretations. None of them incorrect.

This is how meaning works.
It does not arrive with the event.
It is assigned after, usually quickly, often without inspection.
Most people treat that assignment as inevitable rather than chosen.

Losing a job is not failure. It is also not opportunity. It is a fact waiting to be interpreted. What follows depends entirely on the story that hardens around it.

The same is true for rejection, delay, silence, endings. These moments do not explain themselves. They wait to be explained.

The mistake is assuming there is a correct explanation hidden inside the event, and that your job is to uncover it. That belief removes responsibility. If meaning is preloaded, then your inner response is irrelevant.

It isn’t. Meaning is not revealed.
It is imposed. And once imposed, it governs behavior.

Some interpretations keep you moving.
Others justify withdrawal.
Both feel true while you are inside them.

This is where things become uncomfortable.

If meaning is something you assign, then you are not merely reacting to life. You are shaping the internal conditions you live under. That does not grant control over outcomes. It removes innocence.

Responsibility governs what you do. Interpretation governs what it becomes. Together, they determine whether an event turns into momentum or stagnation. The outer facts may stay fixed, but the inner consequences do not.

Most people avoid seeing this because it eliminates a familiar refuge. You can no longer say this ruined me without admitting you participated in what it became. You can no longer wait for time to explain things for you. Time does not explain. It only exposes which stories survived repetition.

Meaning is not something life gives to those who endure.
It is something you construct and then live inside.
Some constructions hold. Others collapse. None are neutral.

Events do not define a life.
The interpretations you repeat do.

And once you notice that, it becomes harder to pretend that meaning is something that happens to you rather than something you are already carrying.

Life does not explain itself. You do.