What Stories Give Us That Life Won’t
With experience, comes the realization that life is not all order and sequence. In fact, as we make our way through this world, too often we find that life is chaotic, maddening, and chock full of unexpected randomness.
Last year, my dad passed away after 91 years of living. Nicely put, he did not “go gently into that good night.” While battling dementia, congestive heart failure, and various other maladies, he burned bridges, laid blame, and left many family members in turmoil and despair before departing from this earthly realm.
So, where was the closure? Where was the final, grateful bow before the curtain fell upon the drama from his life?
At first blush, there wasn’t any — Alive one day, dead the next.
Outside of the context and narrative of his entire life, this final ending felt like nothing more than an isolated event that left everyone feeling empty, vacant, and pining for some sort of meaning.
It was at that moment that I really felt the power of stories and their impact on our own personal narratives.
Recently, Julie Beck wrote a great article in The Atlantic about how we make sense of our lives through stories:
“In the realm of narrative psychology, a person’s life story is not a Wikipedia biography of the facts and events of a life, but rather the way a person integrates those facts and events internally — picks them apart and weaves them back together to make meaning. This narrative becomes a form of identity, in which the things someone chooses to include in the story, and the way she tells it, can both reflect and shape who she is. A life story doesn’t just say what happened, it says why it was important, what it means for who the person is, for who they’ll become, and for what happens next.”
It’s only through the framework of a story that my dad’s life and death began to make sense. While going through his final months, it felt like there was no rhyme or reason to what was happening. Emotions, opinions, and events seemed to manifest in a sea of chaos with some days becoming wilder and more disturbing than others. It was like being on a boat in the middle of an ocean storm, completely at the mercy of Mother Nature and her awesome, terrible power. All we could do was hope and pray for the storm to subside.
So, how do you find meaning in the maelstrom?
Life events bring chaos, but within the context of a personal narrative, they become agents that provide meaning while moving the plot of our lives forward.
Jonathan Adler, an assistant professor of psychology at Olin College of Engineering, notes that “The default mode of human cognition is a narrative mode.” He added:
“Life is incredibly complex, there are lots of things going on in our environment and in our lives at all times, and in order to hold onto our experience, we need to make meaning out of it…The way we do that is by structuring our lives into stories.”
Too often, life just happens and it’s up to us to make sense of it all with the stories that we tell ourselves and each other.
Ultimately, that’s what stories do — they help us find meaning and purpose in a life that offers us many events, incidents, and experiences, but no concrete answers.
We are the ones that make life meaningful, not the other way ‘round.
