THE SCHOOL OF LIFE VIDEO SERIES: How to Narrate Your Life Story

Vasily Perov, aka Wassilij Grigorjewitsch Perow. 1872

The difference between despair and hope often boils down to different ways of telling stories from the same set of facts. Some of the art of living means learning how to tell the story of our lives back to ourselves.

Only a small number of us ever self-consciously write our autobiographies. It is a task we associate with celebrities and the very old – but it is, in the background, a universal activity. We may not be publishing our stories, but we are writing them in our minds nevertheless. Every day finds us weaving a story about who we are, where we are going and why events happened as they did. Many of us are strikingly harsh narrators of these life stories.

We hint to ourselves that we’ve been morons from the beginning. We’ve stuffed up big time. It’s been one disaster after another. That’s how we go about narrating, especially late at night, when our reserves of optimism run dry and the demons return....MORE