The Stories You Choose to Live, Read, and Write 📚

We are all living stories. Stories are all around us and working through us. We make stories. Our lives are stories. 

Paying attention to the stories we’re choosing to live can offer insights into the choices we’re making now or could make later.

When I say we’re living stories, I’m not referring to a solipsistic perspective that we’re always making up our own realities. Rather, I’m calling attention to the way we use stories to understand ourselves and the world.

We make up stories individually and collectively about our identities and beliefs. These stories drive our choices and actions. Consequences ensue. This is in large part what gives our lives a sense of meaning. Stories shape, inform, guide, and determine who we are.

And while all these stories matter, it can be helpful to remember that they are stories.

Thinking about our lives as stories is a useful practice (and one I’m exploring more and more). When you think of your life as a story, you might ask yourself: am I satisfied with the starring role in my own life as well as the bit parts I play in other peoples’ lives? Do I need or want to change anything? If so, why? To what purpose? Stepping back further, you might see patterns in your life that reveal deeper aspects of yourself you’ve forgotten or are just waking up to.

Yet, as interesting as it is to edit and improve the individual stories we’re currently living, there comes a time to step outside of the stories all together and have a good long look at what we’re doing with our powers of creation. We are capable of creating stories of love and peace yet the world continues to be full of pain and suffering. 

This year our individual and collective stories seem fraught with intensity, tension, and conflict. Outcomes are uncertain. I don't think we should give up on the potential for positive breakthroughs, but our future depends on the stories we’re living, listening to, and writing about right now.

What kinds of stories are you living? Reading? Writing? Are they contributing to your own growth and healing? How does the story you’re living impact the world? Are your stories calling you to grow and change?

Let’s write—and live—the kinds of individual and collective stories that can carry us through and beyond 2025. Let’s accept the call to venture out into the mystery of the stories and lives yet to be written and lived. Let’s use our powers of creation to pave the way for new, nourishing stories to be told.

In the words of my brilliant writer-friend, Paul Belserene: “Write as if you’re reading it; read as if you’re writing it. Write as if you’re living it; live as if you’re writing it.”

Write. Read. Live.

"After nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world." 

~ Philip Pullman~

“You write your life story by the choices you make.”

~ Helen Mirren ~