I’ve spoken earlier of this idea that we never need to feel stuck in a certain story.
If we feel like our life has a certain narrative, certain pattern where we’re supposed to be following a certain plotline, we never need to feel stuck within that particular storyline.
We can always start a new chapter, even start a completely new book in a completely new style.
We don’t have to live our lives as if it is this coherent chronicle, where there’s a consistent tone going all the way through.
Imagine you could live- one part of your life could be like this one style of book, maybe a tragedy, and you could have another part could be a comedy, or the other way around, or whatever style.
Doesn’t even have to be the style of, you know, any kind of normal fictional genre.
It can be some kind of strange freeform poetry style.
So we really have the freedom to have multiple stories in our lives.
And I think I can take this even further.
I see that we have so many stories that are going on at the same time in our lives.
And when you look at a book, a coherent narrative it takes all these things that are going on, all these different stories, and it selects certain threads running through it.
If we think about the storyline of some book or movie, it focuses on certain of these threads and makes sense out of them, makes them into these consistent patterns, where stories progress along these clear lines.
At least that’s the typical story, and typically it’s the kind of story we like to read.
It makes a more powerful story when you have these coherent threads running through, rather than just a whole bunch of different things happening.
And yet, it seems like to do this, to make what we think of as a story, you have to select certain threads only.
You have to really focus in on very particular aspects of a life, and essentially ignore almost everything that goes on.
When you read the story of someone’s life or even of a brief time in someone’s life, it doesn’t capture anywhere near the full picture.
And of course, or otherwise, for one thing the story would be so long and full of details that we might never be able to get to the end of the story.
And even if we were able to get to the end of such a story, it would be so full of all these different things going on that it would be difficult to actually catch the main threads that make for the best story.
We would just be wading through these masses of details.
So when a storyteller tells a narrative, it’s always about picking certain elements out and ignoring all the others.
So that’s great for a story, but I think it’s important to remember that for our lives, we don’t have to make our lives fit such a way.
Well, for one thing, we can tell stories of our lives, but we never need to feel like that is anywhere even approximating the full picture.
It’s always going to be one little selection of our lives.
So if we feel a certain storyline that we have, we can always remember that that is only capturing a little bit.
And in fact, imagine the same series of events, the same life, and then you could have many different storytellers that had all witnessed the same events happen, the same life, but these different storytellers could each select different aspects in the story that they chose to focus on.
So they would choose particular threads out of the life.
And if you had a dozen storytellers doing this, you could have a dozen completely different stories that would be telling the story of the same person, and yet it would be divided into so many different stories.
So I find it useful to remember that not only is it possible at any time to start a new story, but in fact we have so many stories going on at the same time.
#newlifestory #yourlifestory #lifestory