What if the cohesion of a life is much like water, a fluid mixing of past, present and future? In this flux, there’s no such thing as chronology. Where does any person’s story begin? With parents, absent or present? Grandparents? One hundred generations before your birth? A dramatic tragedy? Like the wind, no isolated origin point exists to a life.
Story is agitation, the waves born from invisible winds, imposing motion and meaning on a vast ocean. In my favorite Hindu creation myth, the universe is a boundless and tranquil sea of milk, and only through its churning by angels and demons, good and evil, does form, and hence story, arise.
All previous moments, days, months, years, decades, and generations lead to the meager slice of reality we stand beside and point to as my story. We inhabit the motion of progressive fictions and even if they lash and capsize us, we forget that they will inevitably spend themselves on some shore like sea wrack and, like our own bodies, vanish.
If you’re lucky, story and relationship are life-long conspirators amplifying the good. I was not so fortunate—a multitude of stories had to be abandoned to discover relationship and intimacy. And yet, I also had to imagine my lost parents and story them out of the phantasmal.
We become the people we think we are—that’s why stories can be dangerous and even self-defeating. Other people can also become who we think they are and that’s why stories can be disastrous. We can’t help but use stories to connect, but beware, stories will use us. They did me, that is, until they didn’t.