Only Time Will Tell: The Narrative Craft Of Living
Life is made up of stories. True, false, skewed by time, stories map the fabric of what we call us. Where they start and end is never clear and always changing.
There comes a time in everyone’s life when they find out something they’ve been told is wrong, and it changes things. Maybe it was that time in your childhood when your father told you John Denver died having sex with Buddy Holly in a plane. You might still believe that your cat will steal your daughter’s breath while she sleeps. I’ve met more than one adult woman that thought morning wood was caused by a man’s penis filling with urine overnight.
Intelligent people believe cockamamie things. Somewhere, way back in our history, we felt certain whoever planted these old chestnuts in our brains would never lie to us. Years pass and our mixed-bag of nonsense never comes into question. We bounce confidently toward adulthood through a garden of forking paths with bad data that shapes the world. We bumble into other people’s stories mistaking them for our own.
Narrative Perspective is Everything
We hear the word ‘narrative’ a lot these days. It’s an important word. Narrative influences the way we perceive news events, financial hardship, career challenges, and tender moments. Our narrative perspective is how we relate to other people. Something similar happened to me! Things will get better. It's why people devote themselves in religious faith. Is God testing us? Our narrative gives context to the world around us and tells us how we fit in all of this chaos. It is essential to meaning, and meaning is what we seek.
'Narrative' has become a buzz word for news outlets. They promise us history will sort things out, but time has never told the truth to anyone. Their narrative isn’t our narrative, so it must be wrong. Does either of our narratives match the facts? Only time will tell us the lies that can allow you and me to feel at home in our story. That’s how it works. You don’t have to like it, but our narratives are simply all we have.
In Patterns We Trust
Humans are pattern seekers. Conspiracy theories, religious texts, the movies we love, the novels we hold dear, the little incidents that told us we were being gang-stalked by the FBI leading to our schizophrenic break—those are the patterns that lead us. If we can find a pattern, we can make a prediction and gain something. We can avoid consequences and disappointment. We can learn from the pattern’s results. Hunt loud and catch nothing. Tread lightly and the village eats. On a longer timeline, the abuse a child suffers could dig a well of adult strength or stunt them for life. The divorce, the burned-out light, the car wreck, the death of a loved one, the broken shoelace—catalysts for our pattern of change. One man’s pattern is another man’s chaos. So…why?
The Existence of Meaning
It all has to be for something. Everything in our lives serves our narrative. It doesn’t matter what it means to you. What it means to me is the secret of life. My life. Get your own secret meaning. But the pattern doesn’t really change from person to person. We all seek the same pattern and it speaks to us in the same handful of ways. It’s the same skeleton hanging in our display windows and closets, and we drape it in the meat of our individual tale. The goal being: when they hang the whole mess over our deathbeds, we can look up at it and recognize the shape, be proud of it, trace the scars fondly, and embrace the story of us into the dark.
The stories we tell and the stories we relate to have the same skeleton. Every good story is built of the same parts. When I was in college, I rejected this absolute truth. There can’t be a formula for a good story, right? If every movie, every book, every show is the same, what’s the point? It has nothing to do with the content and everything to do with the journey. It’s the key to keeping you hooked, and, more importantly, it’s how we relate to one another. Empathy is born of the pattern, and the shape of that pattern is human.
The Heroes Journey
Dan Harmon calls it a story circle, and it has 8 parts. Blake Snyder, author of the popular screenwriting book Save the Cat, lays it out in a Beat Sheet comprised of 15 beats every movie should have. Before that, Joseph Campbell called his 12 steps The Heroes Journey, and George Lucas used Campbellian storytelling techniques to pen a movie called Star Wars. But it isn’t just Luke Skywalker that walks this path. Every protagonist from romantic comedies, thrillers, and Pixar movies follows the same pattern. It’s the human path. Tom Joad follows it to California in The Grapes of Wrath. And in the story of Joshua (in Hebrew: Yeshua, in Latin: IESVS/Iesus, and in Greek: Jesus), He walks this road to save us all.
Let’s roll with Harmon’s explanation. It has fewer parts. I’ll draw from multiple stories for examples. (If that’s confusing, go watch Die Hard and you’ll find the pattern in all its glory there. Or literally, any other movie that had a script supervisor.)
The Ordinary World: We get a glimpse of our protagonist’s everyday life. John McClane is on a plane to L.A. to visit his wife in Die Hard. Leonard and Sheldon are taking the stairs because someone broke the elevator in The Big Bang Theory. The humans have sent an ambassador to meet with the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica; they’ve never shown, and he is starting to nod off.
But Something is Wrong: Katniss in Hunger Games goes to the tribute ceremony where two kids from each district are chosen to fight and likely die as entertainment.
The Call to Adventure: The catalyst of the story. Harold and Kumar get stoned and hungry, so they climb in the car and head for White Castle; their friendship and lives are changing, and this could be their last big adventure as a duo. Neo takes the red pill. Luke’s aunt and uncle are burnt to a crisp by Storm Troopers. There’s no going back to our old lives.
The Protagonist Enters an Unfamiliar World: In Stranger Things, Will’s pals and their new psychic friend, Eleven, search for their missing chum. Here, they’ll learn the mysterious circumstances of his disappearance and find the means to pull their friend back from the Upside Down. This is always the part of the story we came for. Miracles happen. Water is walked upon. We learn to use lightsabers. We crawl through vents. We learn to play piano because every day is Groundhog Day!
The Hero Gets What They Want: What!? But this is the midpoint! Yep. Here lies the false victory or false defeat. Campbell called it “meeting with the goddess.” The protagonist gets the girl. Luke saves the princess from Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer. But this is the part where we find out we were chasing the wrong goal. The character gets what they want, not what they need.
They Pay a Great Price: Sometimes, we lose someone here. It is the dark night of the soul for our hero. Prim dies in Hunger Games. Bad guys close in. Paul begs Annie to just kill him in Misery. Mark’s potato farm is gone in The Martian. Jesus dies for our sins, and the apostles find they’ve been following a mortal man. This low point pushes us to find the thing we needed all along: meaning.
Return: The tools and proper motivation are all in place. Wayne stops the wedding to declare his love for Cassandra in Wayne’s World. Luke blows up the Death Star with Force-guided aim (it was inside him all along!). Jesus rises from the dead, forgives, and ascends to heaven. Moses parts the Red Sea. John McClane saves his wife and his marriage.
Change: We get a final glimpse of our hero's lives and how things are different. They are fundamentally changed. Some get medals, others leave behind a planet without reason to suffer for sin. We’re all saved. Bilbo Baggins tucks his ring away and feels fulfilled.
Circles, Returning Changed, Shifting Parts
Most television shows arrest us in part 4. We come back week after week for a little more of that fun part of the adventure. If you put the love interests together too soon, it’s a wish fulfilled. We move on. Break Ross and Rachel up, and we wonder if they’re going to get back together. It would be nice to live there, in a stage 4 world of wonder.
Usually, each episode is a smaller story circle within the larger overall narrative. A misunderstanding occurs, or a minor villain shows up to meddle in our hero’s journey. An inner and/or external battle is fought, pushing us a little closer to the next stage without stepping over that stage 5 line. In Lost, every episode covers a different character facing an external problem that parallels an inner struggle, and the narrative moves forwards and backward through time.
While our lives don’t look like this time-honored story arc, we find a way to shove our story in there eventually (much like an episode of Lost). Our lives are squiggly lines that go up and down without warning. Our story circles are many. They overlap. They exist within larger circles. They’re part of other people’s stories. But retrospect allows us to fit it all in there.
We root for the pattern to tear us apart and rebuild us better. We reject the narrative elements that don’t fit and call it bad writing. We do this with our love, our losses, our politics, and our dreams. We choose our set of beliefs to better arm ourselves as the protagonist of our story. Our creeds become tools forged in our spiritual battle with the dark as it pushes at the door, whispering lies to our children while they sleep.
Our narratives have less to do with the linear momentum of day-to-day life and more to do with what fits in our template later. We’re compelled to trim the parts that make us dislike ourselves. Some memories will lose their shape over time, become pliant, easy to stuff in a box. Others we bury in Louisiana graveyards. One day the soft, sinking ground coughs them back up and there’s Grandma, telling you you’ll go to hell for lying.
The Illusory and the Illusion
The Return now could be a False Victory later. We’ll become different people. The story of us shifts. How we see the world is in no small way dependent on how we want the story summarized in the end. Life, sanity, and happiness depend on shifting our narrative to fit our struggle, compelling us forward. But your tale is not my story. It didn’t start like mine, and my book will not end like yours.
It would serve us all well to remember that everyone is a different story, at a different stage, and they are also a protagonist. While it may not have meaning to you, it may explain everything to someone else. The meaning of life is the story we tell ourselves and the story it ends up being and the story it almost was. Choose wisely.
