Do You See Your Life as a Story?

A student of literature is soon taught to see all travel stories as allegorical journeys.

An allegory is a story ostensibly about one thing, but also about something else:  a symbolic journey that occurs in progressive stages.

Since the story is a journey, it often has a beginning and an end.

Since the story is an allegory, the end signals a new beginning.

Memorable journeys of literature include

Dante begins his journey

·                     the journey from slavery in Egypt to freedom in Canaan, a land seen as  home for the Biblical Israelites, a journey of 40 years

·                     the journey of Odysseus from the great mistake that was the Trojan War back home to Ithaca, a journey of 10 years

·                     the journey of Dante, who finds himself in a dark wood in the middle of his life, then travels from the Inferno to Paradiso and to an understanding of "the love which moves the sun and the stars," a journey of 32,000 words

·                     the journey of Dorothy Gale, a rebellious child betrayed by adults, to Oz and eventually back home to Kansas, a film journey of 102 minutes

Along the way, these characters are tested again and again.  The tests reveal to them their deepest selves and the strength of their spirits.

If you see your life as a story, later on, you will see the tests you faced along as the components of your evolving and forming identity, as the way you became your self.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring 

Will be to arrive where we started 

And know the place for the first time.

                            from "Little Gidding," T. S. Eliot

Are Stories Necessary?

The stories that move us, touch us, and change us are necessary.  It may not even be character, plot, or setting that makes a story necessary, but the telling of it, the shape of the narrative, the voice of the teller, the way an idea or feeling from a story starts to dwell in the reader inspiring more ideas and feelings.

Stories give shape and detail to memory.  And, when we lose our memories, we still need stories, maybe more than ever.

In the early stages of her dementia, my mother-in-law became obsessed with her watch.  When we visited, she'd hold her watch up and peer at it from different angles.  Then she'd shake it, insist it was broken, and ask the time.  I'd tell her the time.  She'd be quiet for 30 seconds and then begin to look at her watch again and fret over it and demand to know the time.

"What time is it?  It's broken?  Do you see the time?

 1:15.  1:18.  1:20...

My husband and her caregiver were frustrated and impatient.  They wanted to distract her, to take the watch away, to do something else, but it only agitated her more, so we sat.

1:22.  1:23.  1:26.

"What time is it?  It's broken?  Do you see the time?

1:31

"Oh," she said.  "Now's the hard part."

"What do you mean?"

"It has to climb up the other side."

As her life became increasingly reduced - she still needed stories.  She saw in the youth of the hour, the early minutes, the big hand skipped easily down the right side of the watch face.  Life was good.  But then came the climb up through the 6, 7, and 8 of the hour, as if they were the later decades of life, the hard part.  I understood her story - an ancient one.  The wheel of fortune turns. 

Stories are necessary.