We All Contain Multitudes

A couple of months ago, walking on the beach on one of those rainy Pacific coast days when the sun seems to have left for good, I saw this surprising new addition to a familiar landscape:Someone's story was here in stone, in mortar and pestle and candle-holders. I couldn't tell what the story was, of course. Its plot points eluded me. Some things need words or actions or both. Still, I wondered what emotions those objects contained. Was this a story of remembrance? Of power? Sadness? Loss? Or celebration? A tribute to the ocean whose tides ebb and flow endlessly, only yards away from this cryptic stone face.The mind gets restless when you give it bits and pieces of a puzzle. My mind added someone hauling this heavy artifact to the beach, lighting candles. Was there music? Talk? Community? Or was this a solitary journey? My mind added myself, there in imagination, watching and listening.That's what we do with our lives. We reflect upon the messy business of living, and we create, to a greater or lesser degree, the narrative of ourselves. Julie Beck, in a 2015 article in The Atlantic, writes:

In the realm of narrative psychology, a person’s life story is not a Wikipedia biography of the facts and events of a life, but rather the way a person integrates those facts and events internally—picks them apart and weaves them back together to make meaning.

Or leaves them on a beach for others to ponder over.

In fiction writing, we're big on agency. Whose is this story? Who has power? Who gives momentum? Whom should I care about? I often ask my students these questions. When I revise, I chastise myself for having failed to ask them soon enough in the life of a work.

But the act of telling is both recall and rehearsal. As Monisha Pasupathi, a professor of developmental psychology quoted in Beck's article puts it: 

...rehearsal strengthens connections between some pieces of information in your mind and diminishes connections between others. So the things I tell you become more accessible to me and more memorable to me.

I know that I often write to learn, to make connections, to create meaning. Beck's article suggests this is not only a human characteristic but a necessity. It's not enough to experience life in its many streams. We need to tell those stories. In their telling, we create ourselves.