What We Call Things

I was having a conversation with a student of mine over a cup of coffee.

I don’t remember the entire conversation or the exact words, but I remember something she said very vividly.

She mentioned how the changing of the name of the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America made her realize that everything is made up.

For years we call something one thing, and then suddenly someone decides it should be called something else. And now it has a new name — from what people verbally call it to what appears on maps, in textbooks, and in everyday language.

That realization is gold.

Because when you really stop and think about it…

all of the words we use are made up.

At some point someone created a word to help us communicate, and groups of people started using that same word to describe something. Over time the word becomes accepted as “real.”

But language is fluid.

And words don’t actually describe reality — they point to it.

Take the word red.

Most of us are referring to a color somewhere along a particular spectrum — an apple, a cardinal, a sunset.

But if we’re speaking to someone who is color-blind, that same “red” might appear as muted yellow or a brownish-grey.

Even more subtle than that, two people who both see color normally might still experience the color slightly differently. What one person sees as distinctly red, another might perceive closer to orange (one of my favorite colors, by the way).

Isn’t that fascinating?

We’re all perceiving the world through slightly different lenses — our senses, our physiology, our culture, our environment, our experiences.

No two perceptions are ever exactly the same.

Which brings me back to the Gulf.

Whether someone calls it the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of America is ultimately just language.

The body of water itself doesn’t change.

It doesn’t cease to exist because we give it a different name.

And it certainly doesn’t know it has a name at all.

It simply is.

And that makes me wonder:

What would happen if we started questioning our words and our thoughts — recognizing that they are simply descriptors pointing toward something?

And what if we stepped even closer to the experience itself?

Feeling sensations.

Noticing emotions.

Seeing colors without immediately labeling them.

The warmth of sunlight.

The sound of wind moving through the trees.

Just the experience.

The unique, embodied, lived experience of being here.

The words are helpful.

But the experience is the real thing.

In yoga philosophy this is the idea of Nama Rupa — name and form. In Buddhism it appears as the distinction between labeling and direct experience.

Those words or traditions don’t really matter.

It’s that glimmer of insight — and returning again and again to the experience itself, without labels — that becomes the practice.