Life as a story?

In my life, I've never known what I was doing from one minute to the next; I was just working, I didn't have a "career." I grew up in a time when people didn't think like they do now about what they are going to be and do. I wanted to be a whole person, I wanted to be a good person, I wanted to be all those big things, and none of that had anything... See more

I always make the mistake, though, in thinking that I'm going to read my way to the answer. It’s only through my habitual disappointment with the philosophers that I am reminded that there are other experiences that have to happen in order for us to really know anything.

It is, of course, a dramatized caricature of our common curse — the treacherous “if only” mind that haunts all of us, in one way or another, to some degree or other, as we go through life expecting the next moment to contain what this one does not and, in granting us some mythic missing piece that forever keeps us from the warm glad feeling of enou... See more

If we are not careful enough with the momentum of our own minds, we can live out our days in this expectant near-life existence.

The wanting starts out innocently — awaiting the birthday, the new bicycle, Christmas morning; awaiting the school year to end, or to begin. Soon, we are awaiting the big break, the great love, the day we finally find ourselves — awaiting something or someone to deliver us from the tedium of life-as-it-is, into some other and more dazzling realm of... See more

We build our lives around structures of certainty — houses to live in, marriages to love in, ideologies to think in — and yet some primal part of us knows that none abides, knows that we pay for these comforting illusions with our very aliveness.