But why one? Why "a" story? A skilled storyteller can pluck a cornucopia of tales from one set of events. Everyone's a villain, everyone's a hero, everyone's a martyr, everyone's an oppressor. Yeah - as you near the end you better be able to look back and find some meaning... but in the end, it isn't up to us to write our stories, it's up to our loved ones.
I was driving to work today. I took a long meandering drive because it's Monday and I was early and I could afford to be a little lazy and enjoy the drive to work. The drive goes past my parents' house and I used to take every day. As I was driving, I thought: Parallel universes where every option is explored, eh? Many stories. Not quite what you meant but still, also, interesting to ponder. I write a lot of "What-if" scenarios. Like, "What if this exact thing happened...but then this?" There is a _refugee_ who didn't move out of her parents' house this May. I wonder what life is like for her.
He could also have said, "I went to work with the belief that my story could speak in some way to how growing up on an island affects how one lives in the world." or any number of entrances. In any event, I'm not so much talking about writing our story (although perhaps it doesn't become a story until it is told or written). This meditation is more on taking the randomness we experience and finding a structure in it - seeing it in stages that take us from innocence, say, to experience; from a fragmented to an integrated self. I speculate this: If there is no grand breakthrough and no change, if we keep destroying ourselves in the same way over and over again, it might be difficult finding an allegorical journey in our story or even a point. This particular question arose from another one that I am working on called, "When did you smarten up?"But why one?
Yes, there are many stories. If we are writing it, we have a multitude of entries to choose from. In the preface to Obama's memoir, Dreams from My Father (p. vii, 2004 edition), he writes this: [I] went to work with the belief that the story of my family, and my efforts to understand that story, might speak in some way to the fissures of race that have characterized the American experience, as well as the fluid state of identity -- the leaps through time, the collision of cultures -- that mark our modern life.
Beginning with that mission and that belief, he chose aspects of his story that particularly addressed race, identy, and culture.but in the end, it isn't up to us to write our stories, it's up to our loved ones.
Yup, especially if we're gone. Some people, though, want to make sure they have their say.
I reject your structure. I reject your meaning. I reject your integration. My wife was bored one weekend she was home from college. She took a class in MS Access at Comp USA. It meant nothing until three years later, when that one weekend class caused a division that wasn't hiring at a place she interviewed at (for a completely different job) to call her in. She ended up as a software architect for a great lady that ended up leaving after being sexually harassed. Three years later, though, my wife performed the wedding ceremony for her ex-boss and her new husband, whom we ended up going to Vegas with. Then we didn't see them for a while because they moved to Arizona. Then they moved to Los Angeles and we saw them every six weeks or so. Two weeks ago they moved back to Washington - they're going to beat us there. Our relationship with that couple is driven almost entirely by coincidence but it started with a free weekend seminar at CompUSA twenty years ago. How will it end? Who knows. I'll say this - when we were worried about trademark infringement with a large grocery chain, the husband called up the legal counsel of the large grocery chain because they're golf buddies. I would literally go insane if I had to parse our relationship for meaning.