Epiphanies and Giggles

My effort to define reframing cheated a little. I focused on the big, disruptive kind that is easy to spot. Macro-reframing. But we also micro-reframe.

Micro-reframing is unremarkable, fading into daily life. A small shift might spark a giggle; a stronger one, genuine surprise. There’s a whole continuum well short of epiphanies and tectonic pivots.

If we never wiped the slate by macro-reframing, life would be pure monotony. If we wiped constantly, we’d be too disoriented to survive. Instead, we seem to strike a sweet spot: enough micros to keep things lively, and enough macros to keep things fresh. If this sounds exactly like the rules of storytelling, that's correct. You might substitute "plot twist" for reframing.

It’s the same process whether outcomes seem huge or tiny. The only difference between macro and micro reframings is in the "seeming", as determined by our familiar faculties of thought and feeling. Our brains, as usual, comment. Categorize. Scream. Giggle. Audience reactions may vary, but that's all in the interpretation.

Because it’s all the same free process, we could, in theory, macro-reframe constantly. But the psyche needs continuity, so surprise must be meted out sparingly.

Since I explained reframing by using meta-framing—gasps and eurekas—as examples, further explanation is necessary of what framing actually is.

Here’s my proposal: we reframe constantly, though we fail to notice because it’s so innate (and impossible to measure given that it subsumes all experience). Micro-reframing generates the experience of time, movement, and change, much like a film projector.


Epilogue: When cognition and emotion—hearts and minds—react to reframing, the sense of micro vs macro is, I said, an interpretation. But since we'd previously defined reframing itself as a matter of interpretation, what we're doing is really meta-interpretation.

"Interpretation of interpretation" may sound complicated, but it isn't. Literary criticism, after all, is the interpretation of an interpretation, and it doesn't seem very fancy at all.