I was fortunate last week to attend a lecture featuring Mary Catherine Bateson and Cathy Salit. In the 1980s, I read Bateson’s remarkable book, Composing a Life.
That book had a profound effect on me. Rather than thinking about my life as something that happens to me, I realized that I could think intentionally about shaping and reshaping my life. I started to see my life as a giant improvisation performed on a stage of my own making.
Shaping the Story of Your Life
It turns out that not only can you compose your life as you live it, but you can compose the life you’ve lived by shaping the stories about it that you wish to tell.
At the end of the lecture last week, the moderator encouraged each of us in the audience to try telling our life stories in two different ways:
- One story was to highlight the discontinuity of your life.
- The other was to feature its continuity.
Trying out each storytelling approach
I had come to the talk with two friends and we decided to try the exercise over dinner. And so, over a long and fascinating meal and many glasses of wine, we regaled each other with our life stories.
In the first story, we highlighted the discontinuity of our lives — the shifts and pivots and disruptions. In the second story we featured the through-lines from our lives that wove together the parts. Both versions were grounded in reality.
In the couple of hours I spent with my friends, I learned more about them than I had ever known. We were all three glued to the conversation and by the end of the evening, we had come to see one another in new and remarkable ways.
Victim vs. Agency
As I listened to their stories and related my own, I realized that when each of us told our life stories from the point of view of disruptions, we positioned ourselves as victims of circumstance. But when we highlighted continuity, we saw ourselves as agents who had composed our lives around our interests, abilities and passions.
When I used the same exercise with my husband the next night, I found that I could make up the story of my life in many ways — each of them would be true and each of them would capture something quite different and revealing. And depending on which story I choose to tell, I see myself quite differently.
ThisTell Two Very Different Stories of Your Life
If you want to have a fascinating evening, invite a partner or friends to join you in relating your life stories in two ways — from the perspective of discontinuity and from the perspective of the continuum. Then, discuss how the different stories about the same life reshape the way you think about yourself. You’ll get to know your friends better and you may wind up thinking about the life you’ve lived quite differently.
Remember, you get to compose your life as you live it. But you can always recompose it after the fact!
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