Ordinary conversation, too, is full of stories that play a central role in developing an imagination for life. The repeated telling of a story gradually allows the pieces of life experience to find their relation to each other.
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A philosophy of life begins to take shape when you educate your heart and cultivate your life. You read, you talk, and you think; you don’t just act. You consider your experience and take lessons from it.
During a dark night of the soul, it helps to have your imagination wide open, both active and receptive. But we live in a world charmed by studies filled with numbers and charts, and machines full of blinking lights and a steady hum. We reduce most of life to factual and technical language and feel satisfied with talk of genes and DNA. In this environment, imagination, wit, and humor seem soft and nonessential.
Over time, you may tell it more effectively, and its sheer beauty will help you and connect you to the people in your life. You will find unexpected pleasure in the aesthetics of your thoughts and words, and that, too, will keep you going deeper, looking for further insights and language.
Narrative thinking, on the other hand, is necessary for understanding the unique
individual in front of you. Stories capture the unique presence of a person’s character and how he or she changes over time. Stories capture how a thousand little influences come together to shape a life, how people struggle and strive, how their lives are knocked about by lucky and unlucky breaks. When someone is telling you their story, you get a much more personal, complicated, and attractive image of the person. You get to experience their experience.
The third thing I’m asking myself as people tell me their stories is: What’s the plot here? We tend to craft our life stories gradually, over a lifetime. Children don’t really have life stories. But around adolescence most people begin imposing a narrative on their lives. At first there’s a lot of experimentation. In one study, for example, McAdams asked a group of college students to list the ten key scenes in their life. When he asked the same students the same question three years later, only 22 percent of the scenes were repeated on the second list. The students were in the early process of understanding the plot of their lives, so they had come up with a different list of episodes that really mattered.