Who’s writing your story?

I love opening lines. From the famous (“Call me Ishmael”, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen”, “He was the most extraordinary man I ever knew”) to the less well-known. Ursula Le Guin called them doors to worlds.

The cultural variations with folk tale openers are fascinating. The Koreans have Once, in the old days, when tigers smoked…, and the Catalans, Once upon a time in a corner of the world where everybody had a nose… But I like a simpler Arab version which goes There is a place, a long time ago… Immediately we’re off on our way, curious as to where we’re going to go, keen to see what we’re going to learn along the road.

As Aristotle and now psychologists have shown down the years, we’re wired for storytelling. We tell stories to our friends, to our work colleagues, to our clients, to ourselves – sometimes true, sometimes less so. And yet where do we sit in our own story? In the driving seat or as a passenger?

In my circle there’s some disagreement over this. A friend holds that everything happens for a reason. Out of polite consideration, she doesn’t go as far as predeterminism – that our every path is already mapped out – but does point to happy coincidences, and even on occasion to the planets being aligned.

It could be said this is essentially hindsight. In filtering and processing information, our brains look to make the connection between two events to infer causality and by extension meaning. B happened because A happened which led to me not getting the job. At one extreme, this can be what psychologists call apophenia – the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful relationship between two random elements.

For me, this train of thought takes away our own agency in what we do. From the perspective of the metaphor above, this implies we’re passengers along for the ride, with only a perceived influence on the way forward. Being generous to my friend’s view, any reason for me would be the learning that comes from whatever happens.

On the other hand, I like to think I come from a strongly independent, free will background. Good or bad, my values and cultural beliefs lead me to consider that I drive my actions. I make my own decisions and in turn I take responsibility for them. The events that happen in my life are through my making or are simply occurrences along the way, neither predetermined nor sent by some higher power to test me.

Now, smart people like Ariely, Kahneman, and Harris (and a whole lot of neuroscientific research) show us that this concept of full and rational free will is at best naïve if not a complete illusion. Our decisions are typically made by our brains on an unconscious level before we then become aware of them. How does that leave me in my car?

Good question.

The get out of jail story I tell myself is that this is my story. I argue for us setting our own paths and our own storylines, and not simply allowing ourselves to be swept along by external factors like leaves in the wind. If we don’t like something, we can change. We’re not trees.

For psychology also tells us that our reaction to an event influences our way forward more than the actual event itself. If the purposeful path we map is more determined by our experience, instincts, and backstory than we realise, this does not detract from it being our story.

The lesson here is probably more to do with building greater clarity to understand our inputs, our motivations, our preferences, and ultimately our ‘choices’ as much as possible. The less mysterious the person in the mirror is, the greater our vision for the road ahead will be. Although there are common plots and patterns to all our lives, our individual story is still gloriously and uniquely our own. And as Amanda Gorman says,

Every day we write the future.”

Let’s drive.

Julian

I help people lead their own way forward