Chapter 04: A Common Story of Individual Discovery

Our stories all emerge from a common origin, but that source has a propensity for diversification that ultimately facilitates the multitude of distinctive journeys that define our individual lives. We may generally live in similar settings within our given communities, but our experiences vary based on the slightest differences that create a unique set of circumstances for each of us. We inherently know the specific course of our existence develops into a personal narrative even if many of us feel that the world remains relatively unchanged, but the illumination of its meaning requires us to actively take part in our own stories and those of others. This is a reminder for all sentient beings that we must live life in order to know it, and we do this by embodying and empathizing with multiple characters to appreciate where we converge and diverge in our ways of being and to understand what is fundamentally constant and what inevitably changes.

It is important to realize that we are offered different roles to play in diverse conditions to discover and follow our own paths, which is the fourth assumption of the viagnostic narrative. Without variations we experience in the ecosystem of our interactions, we could neither uncover nor build upon the fertility of the truth that leads both to the distinct accounts of our lives and their possibilities. Naturally, these differences produce a series of predicaments that turn into conflicts and misfortunes that never seem to be distributed fairly among those who suffer or those who are emotionally and morally affected by witnessing the suffering of others. However, these adversities also generate opportunities for us to translate undesirable scenarios into fortuitous performances that reflect the essence of what we truly are. Life calls upon us to act or resist in some special way that manifests an element of the truth that only we can personally reveal. Each of us is designed to perform any number of roles on the great theatrical stage of life and we spend our time trying to find ourselves in those situations where we can be who we really are.

Crisis is unavoidable. Although we can prevent or delay many events or at least avert some unfavourable outcomes, we are enveloped as living creatures by a shared reality that ensures calamity in our lives because we are capable of experiencing pain and because we are attached to that which has perceived value in the universe. Arguably, many of us invite drama into our lives to feel alive and especially to test our need to matter in some way through our competitiveness or through our battle with the alleged evil we sense in our environment. But whether we seek to instigate or evade dramatic events, we are able to view the displeasing or distressing episodes we predictably or unexpectedly encounter as options to play key roles that move our stories forward in a manner that gives us ownership of those narratives without need for control or possession. Our power lies in the choice to partake in the splendour and cruelty of existence in order to bring about some semblance of genuine meaning from which we have the capacity to derive, instead of feeling or demanding that the world owes us something. Unless we deliberately engage life, it will appear as if it is forced upon us and we will fail to board the train or ship destined to the natural habitat of our souls.

As long as we have the will to participate, our stories will constantly evolve, and the more we participate, the more our paths branch out in various directions wrapped in ambiguous challenges for us to discover which routes among the endless streams of possibilities will align with our own inner nature. It is here where we begin to see what we are and what we must do. Whether we bring life into the world and nurture it or we introduce the next convenient tool that may improve our circumstances and alter our interests, we seek to achieve something of recognized value in whatever it is we do. And given how precious the time we all have in the universe, it should be obvious to any of us who care about anything beyond ourselves that we should not waste it on frivolous things or on supporting those who treat our home planet like a trashcan or its residents as expendable creatures.

As we voluntarily clutch the rails of reality to climb up or down the stairwell to an unknown and impartial fate, we come to realize that our fundamental concern is not with what we will physically gain before we die but with how we will live our lives. We characterize our existence by how we conduct ourselves in dealing with both the preferred outcomes and undesirable conditions we face as well as by how we are transformed by our choices and experiences. As we come to our own personal insights about what we are and what is significant to us, we find ourselves making sense of the story we wish to write with the hope of playing its lead role. But we do not have to be the most articulate writer or the most convincing actor to convey our viable version of the truth. We only need the ability to imagine and utilize the power we can harness, however pronounced or diminutive it may be, to convert our particular conceptions and images into actualities that emphasize something of meaning to us and possibly to others.

This is a common story of individual discovery that we must all undergo to realize our intrinsic way of being through our participation in life, but developing our own stories requires that we appreciate all of the pieces that form or support the narrative because each piece uniquely and decisively contributes to the meaningful assembly of our lives. They also come together to be set in motion like the gears of a clock synchronized to accurately inform us as to the time of day that has elapsed. Hence, we need to understand and coordinate, where possible, aspects of our stories to be in line with one another so that we can successfully depict the value we recognize through our performances as individual actors in each other’s dramas.

NAVIGATING THROUGH THE DRAMATIC TRUTH OF OUR LIVES

The viagnostic narrative has a number of integral components, where each serves a critical function in constructing and actualizing our stories. We typically think of the plot or storyline as the essence of the story, which undoubtedly strings together all of its elements as described in a novel or screenplay. However, the story requires a stage or setting in which to be told as a set of relevant events and experiences. It also needs actors in their respective roles to express the story and maintain its momentum through the dialogue of their verbal and nonverbal behaviour that incite or respond to the events, which outline the sequence of the narrative. Finally, an attentive or receptive audience, as the recipients of the narrative, is required to witness or listen to the story as much as, if not more than, someone to narrate it.

The narrative unfolds through the interactions of sentient existence that bring out the meaning of life. There is no story or play without its actors, and actors cannot perform without their roles. In our own personal and professional lives, we play a multitude of roles, which involve making decisions and taking actions that lead to both predictable and unexpected outcomes associated with the varying degrees of control we possess at any given time and place. The characters we embody and manifest find themselves in arenas or on battlefields from where challenges and conflicts debouch, and result in either our division or union with others or with our own surroundings. It is in these settings where we learn the lessons of reality and inch towards the essence of what we genuinely are.

On that great stage that we must all share, we serve as agents of our stories searching for the right lines to recite and actions to execute while navigating through the dramatic truth of our lives. Existence is composed of living narratives, and we are their narrators regardless of whether or not we have a receptive audience because we are also the original recipients of our own stories and what we truly learn becomes part of our collective consciousness even if most of us are relatively unconscious throughout much of our lives. The universal truth always finds a way to surface through our circumstances and turns us all unknowingly into its storytellers.

The story and its components jointly symbolize our hunger and struggle to uncover the meaning of our lives as a unique representation of the greater truth, which is indescribable in its pure form. We translate these components through recognizable elements of our being. For instance, our identities, which encompass our perceived individuality, behave as maps to direct our actions through the roles they define. We forget that we play the parts of being someone’s parent or child, or being a teacher, student, business professional, romantic partner or any other part among a seemingly endless list of roles. How we see ourselves or how others see us influences our individual identities and the ways in which we express our nature or capacity through our interfacing bodies, as instruments for our actions and their outcomes, in our dealings with the surrounding world as the platform on which we project our stories, which are stored in our collective memory. This shared memory holds and distributes all accounts of all stories accompanied by their emotional energy to offer us continuity as individuals and communities as well as guidance as we navigate through reality and fantasy along our journey to the meaning of life.

Our own continued sense of self allows our base volition to purposely influence the world as we learn from it. Although much of what transpires is outside of our direct control, we have to act with intention to take ownership of our stories because meaning falls on us personally to derive from the choices we make. Moreover, it is not the encounters or the outcomes of those encounters we find ourselves experiencing or potentially causing that are significant, but rather how we respond to those encounters and their consequences that truly matters. This is why we need to be increasingly clear as to what the narrative really means so that we can play our roles with heartfelt determination and reflect the uncorrupted truth through the portrayed essence of our being.

Our inner honesty is as essential as our outward knowledge of the world because it is what enables us to see the difference between playing our roles and pretending to play them. Pretending is to behave without faith while potentially being driven by greed or terror. It lacks the awareness and sincerity of the story being told, which as a result, denies us access to the underlying truth that our lives are meant to unearth. On the other hand, genuine playing is an open engagement with life like joyful children frolicking in a neighbourhood park. In this context, we recognize pretending as playing, which is a natural part of the process by which we discover who we really are and what we can do as opposed to pretending as a means of hiding our true feelings or intentions, or worse, believing that we are the roles we pretend to play. Playing is like an actor who performs a role in a film or on stage, or a musician who plays music and a dancer who leaps, sways and wiggles in rhythm with the sound and silence of moving notes. We are all performing a role or set of roles in our own stories and in the overlapping stories of other people’s lives just as others are fellow performers in our stories. It is as if we are instinctively collaborating on one another’s theatrical productions, serving as both cast and audience. However, if or when we become aware that we are in this live action movie, we become an omnipresent observer that must remember to look at the world through the eyes of the child in all of us and ask ourselves what we are learning from this personalized motion picture.

Although we might change our roles over time and across situations, we need to commit to our performances to see them through to some meaningful transition. Otherwise, our stories risk being lost and the meaning we seek may never materialize, whether it is in the achievement of a critical goal, the attainment of a deep insight or the expression of unpretentious love. This would be equivalent to actors failing to deliver their lines to reflect the overall intent of the narrative. The play would cease to be. Even seamless improvisation requires all actors to cooperate and roles are complementary to keep the story flowing. Playing allows us to see the truth as long as we are not seduced by the fiction of our narratives. Although we should not pretend to play our roles, we should not attach ourselves too much to them either even if they serve a worthy cause. There is a difference between being devoted to a principle and seeing ourselves as saviours. Most heroes do not perceive themselves as heroes; they simply execute valiant deeds when the moment calls for it. But if we believe or presume that our identities exist independently or confuse them with our essence, we will emotionally die when our roles end and we will not be able to carry our stories forward or commence new ones. This occurs to the countless among us when we retire after decades working in the same career or lose the opportunity to demonstrate the highest excellence in an ability we trained much of our lives to develop. We face being trapped within a false boundary of self, where our sole attachments can confine us to a very limited set of possibilities in manifesting our essence and working towards the universal truth. Reality is our only constant, and we only borrow our identities in this life to play out the stories we need to convey its meaning.

The purpose of fiction is to communicate a message deliberately or unconsciously that may be of some significance to someone in some way without being literal or definitive about everything depicted in a story. Ancient texts serve a similar purpose, but unfortunately, they are often mistaken for absolutes when they simply have lessons to teach or warnings intended to heed. Although we expect to find traces of individual memories and collective histories embedded in the words and images of literary works and holy scriptures, they primarily function as explorations into our nature whether we have reason to agree with them or not. It is crucial that we understand this so that the spiritual impostors and prejudicial skeptics, who take command of the religious and scientific dogma that seeps into our evolving cultures, do not control the narratives that we all share in the responsibility of writing, living and narrating. We must appreciate that our diverse stories contain within them the fundamental truth that merges the personal with the empirical.

BETWEEN THE OBJECTIVE AND THE SUBJECTIVE

The narratives of life offer us clues to the universal truth like trails of bread crumbs leading us through our shared sense of reality. The patterns in the events and characters that outline our stories inconspicuously disclose the secrets of our existence. However, we unknowingly dismiss or discard them because we tend to look purely inward or outward for our answers as if each direction is not compatible with the other. Although their paths are logically opposed to one another, they are both necessary to understand life and they intersect through the self as the subject of our consciousness. The external world means nothing on its own since it is merely a projection of what we seek to discover internally, but we also cannot see inside the darkness of the unknown without a lit world on the outside. It is the through awareness of these two realms that the truth reveals itself and we are its unsuspecting agents, regardless of whether we lean towards a religious or secular persuasion.

Although our alleged pursuit of truth is replete with veiled sociopolitical agendas and unspoken psychological crises, the need for veracity is inherent to our existence because we would not live long if we functioned on complete fallacies through the course of our daily lives. Our lives depend on some adequate grasp of reality. Knowing the truth in itself may not drive us, but we do have a self-serving interest in it. We are attentive to the truth insofar as what we believe is in our interest, and very few of us concern ourselves with the actuality of events or the fundamental principle of things. Although there are demands on our degree of objectivity in some professional identities such as journalists, scientists and analysts, our biases and misconceptions always interferes with our efforts to move closer to an uncorrupted truth because an unmistakable part of us just wants to know something or to be right.

While it is entirely possible to be correct about something even if we harbour an entrenched prejudice about the world, much of human endeavour is generally more concerned with having convenient explanations than with an especially limited or often absent desire to seek truth. It is natural for most of us to believe that we want to know what is true, but our behaviour instead reveals our wish to be right. Our deep need for stability or coherence in the face of looming insecurity drives us to feel confident before achieving sufficient validity. What we want is affirmation, and this extends to the eradication of doubts, which seem like menacing cracks in the fortresses of our minds. This suggests that the more we attempt to harden our personal beliefs into declared convictions, the more we refrain from acknowledging information that may shatter our very fragile sense of a morally impartial reality. Hence, it should not be surprising that many of us spend more time reshaping the truth than facing it and potentially adding to its constant expansion.

Our struggles with the untainted verity of life can make developing and participating in genuine narratives extremely difficult to do. However, we should neither be obliged nor encouraged to make it our sole mission to pursue the truth as an objective endeavour. We only need to respect it and allow it to find us as we all privately seek meaning through the stories of our subjective lives as performers and spectators. We can collaboratively as actors and viewers explore the subjectivity of our experience while remaining faithful to some basic objectivity to our shared reality. How we subjectively feel as characters in the story or as an audience in response to its recital does not fundamentally change the objective reality of mutually perceived events even if our individual presence can affect them.

We are caught within two fields of reality. The first is what we subjectively perceive in the moment based on a lifetime of experience, and the second is what can be objectively measured as real events. However, the truth itself never lies fully in either realm. It floats between them as if it were intended for us to understand. On one hand, our perception intervenes in our known reality by slicing off pieces of it and blending those pieces with other carvings and imaginings to create an almost exclusively new reality. On the other hand, our own experience of reality contributes to what encompasses that reality, which means that what we experience is part of what is real. Hence, with every attempt to observe or interact with it, we also change it. Although we cannot alter the universal truth, we can add to it through our subjective experience and engagement with the world despite the likelihood that we will continue to misperceive objective reality. This is difficult to comprehend because we do not always appreciate how each unique learning process that we undergo pulls us towards the inaccessible truth regardless of how stubborn, arrogant or insecure we might be. Each is merely our own road to personally relevant elements of the truth and it is by simply being partaking in life that we can extract our sense of meaning from reality by manifesting our essence.

Some of us see the subjective as the opposite of what is objective or real while others among us question or reject the very idea that there is even an objective sense of truth. However, many of us regard subjectivity as possessing its own truth and we strongly believe in treating our feelings and intuitions as an unquestionably valid expression of what is real. There is probably a hint of truth in what we individually sense, and so it would be unwise to endorse its outright rejection. While we may never come to a philosophical resolution or agreement on this matter, we can accept the inescapability of the subjective in the development of our stories. The real power of the subjective is to recognize meaning in a reality that the objective can only describe or compute. If that meaning is genuine, then our personal experiences will converge on the truth as a shared awareness that arises from the viagnostic narrative.

However, the subjective can be a concealed attempt to evade our external reality just as the belief in being objective can be a means of inhibiting our uncomfortable feelings or of justifying our false intuitions. In either case, we make efforts to dismiss our fears and doubts or to rationalize our desires and choices as if we were on trial in the courtroom of life. They are obsessions that reflect our defenses against reality and deny us the truth. While an attachment to the subjective could signal the angst of empty meaninglessness, a preoccupation with the objective could stem from personal traumas, especially where a sacred trust is broken by bearing witness to betrayal or discovering that our feelings were exploited. When the foundation of life collapses beneath us, it is understandable how we may hold on too tightly to the ruler of objective measurement or we redirect our attention to those who seem more emotionally vulnerable than we are as a safeguard. We become risk avoidant, but there are no lessons without risks and there are no stories without lessons.

We do not have conscious access to the initial triggers of our apprehensive responses because we partition ourselves into multiple adult and child characters that do not effectively communicated with one another with each personality seeking a different flavour of meaning. We see this in how the slightest noise in communication can release streams of thoughts associated with negative feelings and poor assumptions instilled from both past and more recent experiences. An argument can easily ensue that had little to do with our initial or intended verbal exchange with a colleague or member of the community, but this tends to be much more prevalent when it involves families, close friends and longer term intimate partners where a shared history has been established with pertinent memories secretly guiding and driving our relationships. The consequence of our distorted perceptions of reality is that they activate our basic instinct is to either run away or dominate the situation, and often we do both by first attacking or blaming the other and then fleeing the scene of our interpersonal crime to avoid discovery of evidence that we may have misjudged the matter altogether.

Not surprisingly, the more we rely on our automatic defenses, the more they reveal the inseparability between objective reality and subjective experience in defining the truth. The objective frame provides the background for reality itself, but the subjective is where we overlay its meaning. On one side, objectivity gives us a stable place to build a significant and resilient story because it is founded on a reality that can be corroborated and shared. Objectivity can challenge our desired realities and protect us from dangerous fallacies. It may destroy our fragile hopes, but it provides us access to more reliable opportunities in their stead. In contrast, subjectivity provides us with the capacity to see the essential truth in the meaning of the story through our experience. Although it may be biased and cloud our objectivity, it is not dependent on whether the events and characters are real or fictional. It functions beyond the facts to get to the significance of the truth.

If we can transport these deceivingly opposing notions into the quantum world, the lines between the objective and the subjective begin to blur or bleed into one another. The observer seems to affect the expression of an event by observation alone, and therefore, reality does not appear to exist independently of the witness. In a way, the observer brings reality into existence or perhaps existence to reality. It also suggests that individual experiences and commonly verified facts are not mutually exclusive concepts. Instead of being two completely separate views, they are two sides of the same coin that in unison allow us to explore the universal truth through the great narrative that we identify as life. However, if we reject this, we will imprison our awareness and stifle our ability to find genuine meaning. This paradoxical truth will elude us forever unless we overlay the subjectivity of our inner and outer experiences onto the objectivity of our survival and progress in order to uncover the significance of our sentient existence as we develop our stories and live our lives.

THE UNIQUE EXPERIENCE OF A COMMON NARRATIVE

We may all have very similar or overlapping experiences, but we never have the exact same experiences even in response to the same occurrence. We may share a common reality, but we sense, perceive and interpret it in our own unique manner. Why one person reacts differently from another to the same event or stimulus can depend on countless permutations of factors and conditions. These differences are not there for us to judge but rather for us to consider if all of this diversity is really a complex illustration of a simple truth that binds us together. Although we may not be able to define it in absolute terms, we can sense it through our interactions with our environment and everything living within it with which we develop both good and bad relationships.

We are exposed to numerous examples of commonalities in our beliefs and practices across the rich variety of cultures and histories we encounter throughout our lives. This helps us to reinforce a universal sense of foundation, but our differences and rivalries reflect our options and dependencies. We frequently face the need to cooperate on matters with which we do not initially agree like the rules of the game that must be negotiated or imposed, and this occurs while we are competing with one another on matters with which we do agree such as the life-enabling resources we all need. In a hypothetical universe where everyone has complete autonomy, there is no need for collaboration and no reason for conflict unless we go out of our way to disturb others. But we are constantly faced with waves of abundance and scarcity as we grow in numbers and our reserves are depleted until we discover new sources for prolonging our subsistence. It is our tendency to expand the boundaries of our comfort when we feel confined in the varyingly accessible segments of our universe, and this inevitably leads to many of us invading the sacred territories of others as routinely demonstrated by our bloodstained histories and limited tolerance for diversity that endangers our traditions and notions of the truth. It seems like the world is too small for us to trust one another and share the same necessities while being too big to find common ground across our dissimilarities. When our nature is easily programmed to assume its own value is self-contained, it always feels potentially threatened by others with the same disposition. This is a belief that is promoted and instilled in enough of us to ensure that we do not achieve true social harmony because appreciating the very essence of this harmony weakens the power structures that run our mechanized way of life.

However, if we can all admit that there is a universal truth, then we can find a basis to initiate dialogue and nurture camaraderie. We can establish a common purpose that can set aside our theistic and atheistic leanings because this basic belief can be perceived as God for those of us who believe or as a foundational principle for those who do not subscribe to a personified notion of a deity. It becomes irrelevant when we share the same fundamental assumption. While we can, and many of us do, live our lives as if there is no god dictating or directing our existence, none of us can function without a sense of regularity to the world that gives us a base map on which to operate. This underlying order encourages us to test its bounds and that of our own, and ultimately leads us towards a more comprehensive understanding of ourselves and of the cosmos. If we can accept the notion of an underlying order with a primal source to everything that does not necessarily have a beginning or an end and we make honest attempts to find our own meaning in life, we will come to realize that each distinct experience we have is a slice of a shared narrative. Our lives are personal accounts of the truth, and its versions are derived from a single prototype, which is the greater story of life that weaves our original stories together with conflict and solidarity.

The key realization is that we do not need to fully grasp the universal truth in order for its base reality to provide us with the grounding we need to counteract the wasteful distractions, obsessions and compulsions that undermine the development of our genuine narratives. Even if we find ourselves completely lost in thought or caught in circular reasoning, this basic assumption offers a launching pad or a starting point to where we can return when we no longer know where we are going. We should find solace in this awareness. It reminds us that even if we cannot find purpose, we can at least sense that there is some meaning to find. It is this realization that sustains our efforts to write our stories and embark on our journeys, however long or brief they may be, and that eventually leads to that personal meaning we struggle to actualize and the peace or elation we feel when we do. It is an adventure tucked inside life itself, and our duty is to embrace every moment with the attention it warrants to appreciate the unique experience of a common narrative that we all share. It falls on us to derive its significance from what we learn and how we choose to be regardless of the direction that our individual lives take and the relationships we form.

THE TRAJECTORY OF MEANING

Our stories may follow any number of divergent courses, and they can mean different things to us as cast members and to others as spectators. Given that the viagnostic narrative survives beyond its protagonists, its impact extends to those of us who directly witness or indirectly learn of its key events and to those who later read documents of its accounts or view its film screenings or stage recitals. It lives on in our collective memory as words, sounds, textures and images that reassemble upon recall as revived experiences, and it is the recollections of our recorded episodes and their associated outcomes that we interpret in terms of their relevance to our lives and the truth they convey to us. However, it is how the story starts, unfolds and concludes that delivers its key messages to its participants and audiences, which are not necessarily intentional or conscious. We can refer to this as the trajectory of the narrative from which we can extricate meaning, and there are at least four types of narratives with each one exhibiting its own recognizable theme.

The most common and expected type, which is the myotic narrative, is also the one that is most likely to transpire among the majority of us. This is a life story managed by societally prescribed routines where its natural progression is occasionally accompanied by moments of great excitement and sorrow such as the joyous birth of a child and the tragic death of a loved one. Although this may seem normal and familiar in that it follows the probable trajectory of existence, its lessons are not trivial. The name merely signals a restful and humble awareness of life if we choose to reflect on the extraordinary impact of these inconspicuously ordinary events, but we often miss the point of life because we are too busy seeking stories that are less likely to occur than winning the lottery.

Another common, but less desired trajectory is the myopic narrative. It is a theme that highlights the shortsightedness of the main characters since they often miss the real point of life but end up serving as a warning for the rest of us not to repeat or replay the same decisions under equivalent circumstances as they made. A classic example of this is the rise and fall of those of us who taste momentary fame and success only to discover that we lost everything else that mattered to us, especially after being deceived or abused by parasitic associates who hide in our shadows. Sometimes, we as actors who are playing lead roles get a second chance to restart our lives or to commence new stories as survivors of our own demoralizing mistakes. Generally, this represents the storyline of the tragedy, and it includes all of those dreadful situations where we are swindled or marred but from which we never recover. Sometimes, the tragic hero fits into this theme, but not all sad endings are purely tragedies if they fundamentally changed something in our present or future lives.

The mythic narrative is perhaps the most favoured among us because it encompasses the greater-than-life story that is vividly memorable because of something extraordinary that we have achieved, prevented or surmounted. It typically involves passing on an important life lesson, often in cases where we apparently beat the odds. Although such accounts can create false expectations of life because we may embellish the facts of an arresting story to the stature of legend, they nevertheless possess enough veracity to get the message across to its readers or viewers, and they enable us to feel something that transcends normal experience and inspire action. It is not uncommon for such stories to be deemed heroic in some sense because many of us do courageous things in our lives often as a commitment to others that plays a pivotal role in the course of their lives.

The last theme is the mystic narrative, and it is the one account that leaves us with more questions than answers. It can be transformative much like a mythic story, but it occurs without clarity of its source. It may transform one or many lives but it deprives us of an explanation, which can come with the risk of doubting our deep-seated beliefs or reinterpreting other stories. It is the most mysterious kind of tale because it seemingly defies logic and stretches our imagination. We sometimes refer to these as miracles or perhaps ghost stories, but in all cases, they seem to cross the dimensional boundaries of the known world that we either dismiss with a highly improbable rationale or use to strengthen our faith. This suggests that they are rare, but these are stories that transpire often without our awareness because we do not notice the subtle improbabilities of life communicating to us that the world is much more intricate than we are able to perceive or believe.

The value of our narratives and their themes depends heavily on our outlook on life that is moulded from an early age. This outlook instructs us to assume what we want to gain, achieve or contribute and sways how we choose to live our lives. It separates those who solely want to win from those who want to nurture something of paramount importance in life, and it makes the difference between those who engaged in domestic or professional preoccupation in defense of a muddled mind or severed self and those who genuinely want to approach the world from a place of inner honesty. Our thoughts, feelings and attitudes towards how we participate in our environment and interact with others may appear natural, but they are not absolute and their seemingly innocuous variances can play a decisive role in navigating the trajectory of meaning in our narratives without our direct knowledge. For this reason, we need to operate with wider and deeper awareness if we want to prevent our fate from being totally written for us. Many events are unavoidable, but at some point, our paths will split into multiple options, and one must be selected to seize the meaning we endeavour to find while accepting the risks and opportunity costs of that chosen route.

THE UNWRITTEN STORY

There are a number of common threads across the various stories of our lives. Many of them may seem predictable and reflective of a pattern we see both in our personal accounts and in the history of humanity. Yet they are neither carved in stone nor confined to a handful of outcomes. The future may seem to be written in a world we cannot control, but it is unwritten for the part of our being and surroundings on which we can exert some influence. As long as there is room for change and the quantum dice remain in play, the story has yet to be authored and its musical score composed. Recognizing and exercising our limited sovereignty is critical to shifting from an expectedly undesirable ending to a truly inspiring story.

However, we often ignore our own powers because they seem so imperceptible to us relative to the forces that drive the course of our existence. Sometimes, we do not even know what we want to change, or whether or not we sincerely want to risk trying to make a difference. We tend to be more concerned with achieving and maintaining a manageable outcome for ourselves than with what we can learn from entertaining the possibility of something we never envisioned could happen. While this is quite understandable, it is also how we minimize our chances of developing and actualizing a viagnostic narrative, which can steer us along the path to the meaning we search for in our sleep. Our dreams call to us to awaken and realize the unwritten story of our impartial destiny. The world does not care if we are virtuous or wicked. It is up to us to amend conditions to surface the essence of what really we are, and we are responsible for the things we choose to nurture in ourselves in relation to others and accept the consequences of our choices, good or bad.

Although the overt and hidden sources of power that rule the civilized world tend to confine us to predictable accounts of our lives and minimize the impact of the choices we make, we still manage to impart meaning to future generations. This is because we always end up uncovering, sharing and reciting stories that reveal a commonly underlying need for meaning. The tales we recount typically involve scenarios like overcoming a great obstacle to realize one’s dreams, rebuilding one’s life after a devastating tragedy, and finding the courage to fight in the classic struggle between good and evil. They all share the notion of overcoming unfavourable odds, and they have built into them the potential to defy expectations even when the probability seems so indiscernibly low. We see this particular theme clearly expressed in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, especially in the first part,The Fellowship of the Ring [4]. A small band of friends, adventurers and warriors battle against the invincibility of overwhelming swarms of creatures aimed solely at ensuring their annihilation. This is a horror story on a suicide mission that turns into a profound journey of self-discovery through the test of valour, loyalty and perseverance.

All such stories, factual or fictional, are reminders that as long as we are still breathing and aware of the world and that as long as someone cares enough about us to even the smallest degree, there is hope, there is the possibility of a story whose pages have not yet been inked. Although insecurity, worry and despair are our silent enemies and appear even before the real war is waged, we must accept the challenges of life to make it worth living. Life itself does not amount to the pain we endure. Its meaning is found in why we endure it, and when we remember why, we find and amass the self-assurance we need to realize what has yet to be. We have to embark on a precarious path into the unknown with a little bit of faith in ourselves as we play our assemblage of roles through a diversity of experience to understand life’s primary lessons and manifest the essence of our being.