From: "Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury@www.aeiveos.com>:
>> How about eliminating those memories of ourselves doing something
>> stupid or embarrassing? That should free up a lotta space in my case.
>Never, never, never sacrifice the stories. In the final analysis
>all we've got that makes us unique is collections of good stories.
>(Our skills we can change, our appearence we can change, the underlying
>genes and even the hardware we run on we can change, but the stories
>remain our own.)
My variation on this.
"There is in each of us an ongoing story. It contains our meaning and our destiny. It goes on inevitably whether we pay attention to it or not. This is our "soul story." This story is an ongoing drama that we do not control and into which we are drawn. And our deepest meaning is to stay with that story. Though we do not know its final outcome, nor even what will come tommorrow, there is nevertheless a great joy and a peace in knowing we are with the story. This is our soul's journey. This is what it means to "live one's soul"
We are always at the edge of our lives. Telling our story to each other, to ourselves, writing it down can be the safety net into which we leap when we are jumping off the cliff into the unknown. But there comes a time when we must remove the net. This is the moment when we jump, not into the page of our story, but into our own lives. Not only to tell about it, but to live it. Writing our story and living our story become one action, as one practice. To live it, is ultimately our life, and is the only art that matters.
To live our story is to claim it, no matter what it is is. Not to fix it, not to alter it, not to make it something else or someone else's story. We live our story again and again to explore it, to come to know it, to be trusted to enter into its secret recesses, and then to live it whole, wholeheartedly, from the heart."
( That's all there is, really.)
Adaptation from Deena Metzger's _Writing for Your Life_ (epilog).
Amara
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Amara Graps | Max-Planck-Institut fuer Kernphysik
Interplanetary Dust Group | Saupfercheckweg 1
+49-6221-516-543 | 69117 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Amara.Graps@mpi-hd.mpg.de * http://galileo.mpi-hd.mpg.de/~graps
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"Never fight an inanimate object." - P. J. O'Rourke