What is your life's story?

 I had a dream last night that I moved to a new house in the Midwest.  In my dream I met a new neighbor, and to explain to him who I was I recounted an abbreviated resume of where I have lived, what I have done, what schools I attended, where I have traveled, my family and their accomplishments, and so forth.  This list of items then, in effect, provided a sort of definition of who I am. 

This rang a bell for me when I considered a past BQ topic, what gives our lives meaning?  I recall a meeting maybe 20 years ago when a group of us discussed a list of possible answers to that question that I passed out earlier in the evening that included things like, Life is a journey; Life is the pursuit of pleasure; Life is pain; Life is meaningless; Life’s meaning is to fulfill God’s plan, and many more.   The act of sitting down and considering the ways we react to each of the possibilities in the list provided a kind of feedback that we might not otherwise see.  

Do I think life is a journey?  Yes, a journey we take step by step, every day.

Is life the pursuit of pleasure?  Yes, but more than just pleasure, and pleasure in moderation.

Is life pain?  At times, but it gets better.  And there are many kinds of pain and not all are bad.

The idea that each of us could be somehow defined by the lives we have lived and the actions we have taken through our lives makes sense when we look backwards and examine the decisions we made and consequences of those decisions.  Our “cause and effect” brains can see the billiard balls bumping into each other, each contact affecting both in some way.  We may have made a decision to take a new job, for instance, and that decision had lots of consequences.  Making that decision was important in many ways and affected many people who were not so obviously going to be affected.  You can see it looking back, but you didn’t see it when you anticipated possible outcomes. 

I was recently asked to think of a decision or action I took that had a large impact on my life, and to share that action with a small group.  In the context I am trying to create in this narrative, this life altering decision or action might be seen as defining, in an important way, who I am today.  My life’s story, and the stories of all those around me, has been affected by that one decision I took, and stopping to think about it can be cathartic. 

What is your life’s story, and does it define you?