Write Your Story
Applying Medium’s new writing prompt as a philosophy of life.
As I stared at the empty page in front of me—the three words written in unassuming grey text that I was so eagerly looking to erase with eloquent prose hit me with the force of a cosmic freight train. They were in the wrong place…
It’s the beginning of another new year (in case you hadn’t noticed) and more than ever we are making choices which we hope will result in maximising our future happiness—exercising 5 times a week, saving the pennies, reading more fiction before bedtime, all the things.
And of course this makes sense, as human beings we are evolutionarily preconfigured to structure our lives to avoid emotional or physical pain and seek a state of happiness. With our decisions we aim to decrease the former and increase the latter.
But then reading ‘Immortality’ by Philosopher Stephen Cave threw me into a slight existential loop. Stephen wrote:
“Imagine the book of your life, its covers, its beginning and end, and your birth and your death. You can only know the moments in between, the moments that make up your life… you need not worry how long the book is, or whether it’s a comic strip or an epic. The only thing that matters is that you make it a good story.”
I re-read the last line several times If what he says is true, if you buy into this idea, then it follows that the question ‘What would make me feel happy?’ should instead be rephrased to ‘What would make for a damn good story?’
I kept digging around (the internet is wonderful for this) and found a wonderful essay on becoming unstuck by Jonathan Harris, in which he explained:
To know your myth is the task of all tasks. Of all the stuff that we do in our lives, we make art money, we travel, we start companies… that in some way all of those things fit into a larger container which is our life story, that thing is actually what we’re creating and all of those things are like chapters and facets of the story, it’s like life itself is the thing you make.
It feels to me that peering at life through this storified lens radically alters the way you might choose to spend your remaining time on the planet. The worst nightmare scenarios, end of the world experiences, even if they happened, so long as you make it through alive they might in fact become fantastic opportunities for stories.
The great classics in literature and cinema are all made of epic highs and desperate lows, just ask Kurt Vonnegut:
The same goes for the interesting people in real life too, most have felt the sharp edges of life, some tremendous peaks and troughs on the fortune axis. The lows create the empty space for the highs to evolve.
It is struggle and the striving that define our personal narratives—those courageous moments when we dare to make ourselves truly vulnerable, when we open ourselves up to physical and emotional annihilation and risk it all.
Finally, if you find yourself dreaming up dangerously exciting and unreasonable plans this year try asking yourself the following question and act accordingly:
Even if it doesn’t work out… would it make for one hell of a story?
ps. the last word goes to cold-water surfer Mickey Smith…
“‘If I only scrape a living, at least it’s a living worth scraping… and if I live long enough I certainly might have a tale or two for the Nephews, and I dig the thought of that.”—Mickey Smith
