Finding Stories with Meaning

What makes people despair is that they try to find a universal meaning to the whole of life, and then end up by saying it is absurd, illogical, empty of meaning. There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is the only meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

–Anais Nin, Diary II

Writing the whole of one’s life can be daunting, however, and it’s helpful to narrow the scope to the events that carry the most personal meaning.  But what are these? Of all the things that have ever happened to you, how to you pick which events are most meaningful or important to share?

There isn’t one “right” answer to this questions, but the following sections will provide you with a place to start looking.  More often than not, the most meaningful stories reside in these types of stories:

Stories of Choice:

Everyone has stories of choice, those moments when you came to a fork in the road and had to pick one option and forsake the rest. These could be big choices, such as the decision to accept the new job or to go back to school, or small choices, such as the decision to cut your hair, or call up an old friend. These decisions are an excellent place to excavate for meaning.  How did you come to make the decision you did? Was your heart behind it or did you make your choice based on someone else’s expectations for you?

It is possible that you didn’t recognize these moments as life-changing until after the fact.  Distance and time allow us to assign significance to past events. It is like the difference between writing a diary every day and writing a memoir after the fact. As Tristine Ranier said in Your Life As Story,

The diarist writes from an ever-moving present. Autobiographic writing is written from a later point in time, in retrospect. The autobiographic writer, to a far greater extent than the diarist, re-members the past to find within it the thematic continuity and coherent meaning.

The pattern, the theme and the meaning will often only be revealed in hindsight. By telling the stories of those decisions, you share the significance of them as well.

For an example of a Story of Choice, read

Letter to a Younger Me

Perspective.  What a wonderful thing. Although many things seem to get more challenging as I get older, I am very thankful that age and experience have their own advantages, and that perspective tops the list.  These days, when my own kids are teenagers and young adults, I listen to their struggles and their dreams and their worries and I mostly want to tell them to take a deep breath, and to trust that they don’t have to have it all figured out right now. I wish I could have said the same thing to myself when I was that age. But perspective takes distance and time.  And getting older. Sometimes much older.

Yesterday, as I was going through some old files, I came across a story I wrote a few years ago called “Sixteen.” Read more…

A Woman of a Certain Age

We got the US Census Survey in the mail a couple of weeks ago, and I dutifully sat down to fill it out. I printed my name in the boxes, last name first, and when I came to the space to fill in my age I very carefully and without hesitation wrote “38.” This would be fine, except that I haven’t been 38 years old for 10 years. What’s worse is that it took me a few minutes to realize that it was wrong. How could this happen? How could I just misplace a decade of my life? Memory loss? The dangers of multi-tasking? Teenagers living in my house? Read more…

Personal parables.

The next tip I have for which story to tell is an idea I borrowed from one of my favorite writers – David James Duncan.  He wrote The River Whyand The Brothers K.  He also wrote a lesser known book called River Teeth. In it, he introduces a concept that I love.  He’s a big fisherman and having spent lots of time walking in the rivers of Oregon, he writes a lot about water. In the introduction to River Teeth he writes:

When an ancient streamside conifer falls, finally washed or blown from its riverbank down into the water, a complex process of disintegration begins.  The fallen tree becomes a naked log, the log begins to lead a kind of afterlife in the river, and this afterlife is, in some ways, of greater benefit to the river than was the original life of the tree.

He goes on…

There are, however, parts of every drowned tree that refuse to become part of this cycle.  There is, in every log, a series of cross-grained, pitch-hardened masses where long-lost branches once joined the tree’s trunk.  “knots,” they’re called, in a piece of lumber.  But in the bed of a river, after the parent log has broken down and vanished, these stubborn masses take on a very different appearance, and so perhaps deserve a different name.  “River teeth” is what we called them as kids.

You want to find your “river teeth” stories, the ones that have persisted over the years.  After all the other details and activities and events or your life have washed away or been forgotten, these are the ones that somehow stick.

Maybe you already know what your river teeth stories are.  If you don’t, How can you tell? Here are some clues:

Often, these are the stories that your friends or your kids keep asking you to retell.  They might be the stories you tell at family gatherings?  What are the stories that just won’t go away? They will probably involve how you faced a problem, or embarrassed yourself, or made a mistake, and what you did then.

Often, however, these stories end up being the stories we live by.  These, become the parables of our lives.  They are usually about how we made an important decision, or overcame a roadblock, or learned a valuable lesson, and they may be moments we look back to when faced with a crisis or a decision.  They persist and remain, when many other stories fade away.

For an example of one of my own River Teeth stories, read

River Teeth and Nanny Jo

It’s been about twenty years since that night when I felt things couldn’t possibly get worse. I was tired, over-committed, and a single-mother. In the midst of my life’s uncertainties, I somehow decided that it would be a good idea to get a kitten for my four-year-old daughter, Katie Bess.

I know. What was I thinking?

I ran the idea by Nanny Jo, a feisty, fine Southern Belle of a woman. Also, my former mother-in-law. Even though her son and I had divorced the year before, I was grateful that she had staked out her corner in my life and intended to stay. She also loved animals, and I knew I could trust her opinion on what I thought of as The Cat Decision.  Read more …

Celebration Stories

Celebration stories are a little different from Stories of Choice or Personal Parables.  Although written from your own experience, they are usually written with someone else in mind for the purpose of celebrating that person’s impact on your life.  They are the letters written to parents on Mother’s Day or Father’s Day. They are the congratulations given to a graduating senior.  They are the stories shared for a wedding anniversary. They are the memories written down to commemorate someone who has died.  Sometimes Celebration Stories are the easiest way to begin writing because they focus on someone other than ourselves.  However you get started, I can tell you from experience that no gift will be more gratefully received than the gift of a Celebration Story from you.

For examples of Celebration Stories, read

An Open Letter to My Mother on Mother’s Day

Dear Mom,

Mother’s Day snuck up on me this year.  Spring flew by, and I found myself scrambling to get a package in the mail to reach you in time.  I stood in the card section of Border’s Books looking for an appropriate card, and noticed that they seemed to fit two basic themes:  1) Thanks so much for giving birth to me, and 2) Thanks for putting up with me for all these years.  Read more …

A Daughter Walking Away

Almost five years ago, Katherine, our oldest daughter and a recent high school graduate, decided she wanted to go live in Boston for a year between high school and college. She got on Craigslist, found a job and an apartment, and acted on her plan to move as far across the country as she could possible get from our home in Oregon. Katherine had always had an independent streak, so this was not a shocking decision. To be fair, we supported the idea. I’ve always felt that it was a good idea—especially for a woman—to spend some time living alone at some point in one’s life. I just thought it would have been nice for her to be independent a little closer to home. Read more …

Five and Ninety-Five

I’d been hearing about Betty Stewart for years. In addition to being a woman in her 90’s and a resident of the assisted living facility where both my parents worked, I knew she was also one of my father’s best friends. Often, when I called home, I’d hear impressive stories about her. For example, one day she saw my father riding to work on his motorcycle. She told him she’d never been on a motorcycle before and decided that it was her time to try it, and my father was just the person to take her. So my dad fitted her with a helmet, rigged a seat belt of sorts on his Honda Goldwing, and took Betty for a ride. Another time, after a snowstorm, she and my dad bundled up in jackets and hats and went outside to make snow angels. There were also frequent scares among the facility staff when they’d see an old woman kneeling on the sidewalk and sent out the alarm, “Resident Down!” only to realize that Betty was weeding the flowerbeds. Feisty. Read more…