180: Moving Target
Hi everyone, welcome back.
This month, we’re continuing the Becoming We series and exploring the three parts that make us human: body, egoic mind, and soul. In February, we focused on the body. Now we turn our attention to the egoic mind.
There’s a memory I have of my grandmother that still makes me smile.
Grandma Edna was a farmer’s wife in every sense of the word. She cooked three meals a day, kept a garden, canned vegetables, cleaned the house, and helped butcher animals. She didn’t work outside the home. She didn’t even drive. My mom tells a story about trying to teach her once—setting up hay bales in a field as practice targets—and she hit every single one. After that, everyone quietly agreed that driving was… probably not her path.
It would be easy to assume someone like Grandma Edna was set in her ways—a steady pillar of consistency, rooted in a version of the world that didn’t change much. Which is why this memory stands out.
One Easter, we were sitting in her living room watching a basketball game. Grandma wasn’t particularly into basketball, but she was paying attention. After a few minutes, she leaned forward and said, “You know, people are getting much taller than they used to be.”
My eight-year-old self looked over at her, confused. “What do you mean, Grandma?”
“Well, look at them,” she said, pointing at the TV. “They just keep dunking the ball. When I was young, nobody could do that. Maybe the game is too easy now.”
I laughed a little… until she kept going.
“This is really terrible,” she said, perturbed. “Look—they did it again. It’s way too easy! They should make it so the hoop moves around.”
“What?” I said, now fully entertained. “You think the hoop should move?”
“Yes,” she said, completely serious. “Attach one of those new-fangled robots to it. Have it go up and down, side to side. That would make it much more interesting—and more fair for the little guys.”
Every time I watch someone dunk now, I think of her.
Should have moved the hoop around.
Our Changing Brains
At the time, I thought Grandma’s comment was just a slightly out-of-touch perspective from a lady going senile. But I see it differently now.
What I didn’t understand then is that our brains are shaped by the worlds we grow up in. The patterns we see over and over again become the patterns we expect, and over time, those expectations start to feel like reality.
For a long time, scientists believed those patterns were fixed—that by adulthood, the brain was essentially set. You got what you got. We now know that’s not true.
The brain is constantly changing. This ability is called neuroplasticity—the brain’s capacity to rewire itself based on experience, attention, and repetition. The paths we walk most often become easier to follow, and the thoughts we think most often become easier to believe. What we call “personality” is, in many ways, just practiced wiring.
Stages of Development
A study published in November 2025, from the University of Cambridge, adds another layer. Researchers analyzed around 4,000 brain scans from ages 0–90 using MRI data that maps how brain connections are organized. They discovered that the brain doesn’t develop in a smooth, gradual line. Instead, it reorganizes in major shifts at key stages:
Birth–9 (Childhood)
9–32 (Adolescence)
32–66 (Adulthood)
66–83 (Early aging)
In early life, the brain is experimenting and shaping itself by rapidly building and pruning connections. In adolescence and early adulthood, it refines and strengthens the patterns that help us navigate the world. By our 30s, those patterns become more stable—more efficient and more familiar. Later in life, the system begins to loosen again.
When I was eight, sitting next to my grandmother, my brain was in a phase of rapid shaping—taking in everything, building pathways, forming patterns that would follow me for decades. My grandmother, meanwhile, was in a very different phase, with a brain that had spent a lifetime reinforcing certain ways of seeing the world.
Of course she thought the hoop should move.
That wasn’t ignorance. It was wiring.
Recognizing the Patterns
Last week, we talked about metacognition—the ability to notice our thoughts. That step matters more than we realize, because before we can change a pattern, we have to see it.
The egoic mind is incredibly convincing in this way. It doesn’t present itself as one possible interpretation; it presents itself as the only reality. It tells us this is who we are, this is how other people are, this is the truth. And because we’ve thought these thoughts so many times, they feel obvious and fixed—like a basketball hoop that has always stayed in one place.
Sometimes what we need is someone to hold up a mirror—an outside observer who can notice the pattern and suggest that another way might be possible.
Intentional Disruption
So the question becomes: if the brain can change, how do we begin? Not in theory, but in the middle of an actual moment, when the pattern is already in motion.
The first step is still awareness, but with a subtle shift. Instead of asking, “Why am I like this?” we begin to ask, “What pattern is happening right now?” This moves us from being the narrator of the story to being the observer—the one watching it unfold.
From there, we don’t need to overhaul everything. We just need to interrupt the pattern, even slightly. A pause before responding. A breath. A moment of hesitation. This might not look like much, but neurologically, it’s a huge deal. The brain is expecting the usual sequence, and when that sequence is disrupted, even briefly, something new can emerge.
The work, then, is repetition. We have to do this over and over again. It is often the least glamorous part of the process. The brain changes through repeated experience, not through a single breakthrough moment. The old pattern will return, because it has been practiced for years. But each time we notice it a little sooner, pause a little longer, or choose something slightly different, we begin to reinforce a new pathway. At first, it will feel unfamiliar. Over time, it becomes more accessible—not because we forced it, but because we practiced it.
Rewriting the Playbook
What gives me hope is not the idea that we can become entirely different people overnight, but the understanding that we are not finished. The patterns we carry were shaped in particular seasons of our lives, often early ones, when we were learning how to belong, how to stay safe, and how to make sense of the world. Those patterns made sense then, but they are not the only options available to us now.
The brain has always been changing. We’re just beginning to participate in that process consciously.
So this week, the invitation is simple. Notice one pattern. Watch how it shows up. See if you can pause, even briefly, and experiment with one small shift. Change doesn’t begin with becoming someone else. It begins with seeing clearly and choosing, just once, to walk a different path.
And who knows. Maybe we don’t need to move the hoop. But we might discover we’ve been playing the same game for a very long time—the same path, walked so many times, it became the easiest one to follow.
Becoming We is the realization that this voice is not the only one. Within us are many ways of being—some well-practiced, others quieter, waiting on the sidelines. Neuroplasticity gives us a way to begin working with that reality. It allows us to start subbing in new players, giving different parts of ourselves a little more time on the court, and slowly strengthening new pathways in the process.
At first, those new responses may feel awkward or unfamiliar, like they’re a step behind the pace of the game. But with time and repetition, they begin to find their rhythm. What once felt unnatural starts to feel possible, and eventually, even normal.
Over time, the game doesn’t just change—we do.
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