Story. Place. Loss. -- The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past

As we end 2021 Joan Didion39s writings can help us understand the time and place we are in understand the story of our lives and find ways to adjust to ways of living that seem to be lost to the passing of timeThe only thing predictable in the future is going to be the constant unpredictability in a world of rapid technological change a million battling narratives demographic shifts the elastic nature of what work and careers might be and the vast internal and external migrations taking place around the worldJoan Didion was prescient in noting that we may find succor in story place and dealing with lossThe Importance of NarrativeJoan Didion39s most famous sentence might be quotwe tell ourselves stories in order to livequotIn many ways each of us is a compilation of stories who intersect with other people who are compilations of stories and when we meet it39s often like splicing two separate films into new stories about us versus just a story of you and meToday amidst a timeline of stories algorithmic stories curated stories and embellished to pixel perfection stories we hunger for stories real relevant and resonating that help us make sense of our lives and the world around usAnd while our internal story telling brings order and narrative and helps us make sense of our disconnected moments and find ways to resurrect and reinvent ourselves we can also lose our bearing and sense of reality with some storiesThe critic Michiko Kakutani noted quotone of the recurrent themes in all Didion39s books both fiction and nonfiction is Americans39 penchant for reinventing themselves their belief in fresh starts and second acts a faith on the one hand that helped settle this country and fueled the American dream and yet on the other has resulted in rootlessness and anomie the discarding of personal and public history Narratives Didion suggests can provide order but that order can also be an illusion or worse in the case of political spin masters a disingenuous connecting of the dots meant to sell false gods and shoddy goodsquotStories are neither good nor bad but what they teach us and how we incorporate them into our lives makes them soThe Influence of PlaceConfucius said quotNo matter where you go there you arequotBut even if we take our old selves to new places we believe that a change of scene can mean a potential change of selfPlace defines most people We are defined by where we were born brought up and where we liveSome people cannot wait to leave where they are while others pine to return from where they came Others move from place to place in quest of fame fortune family and moreIf life is a journey through time and space in search of meaning place plays a key roleWe often leave a place to go somewhere else to reinvent ourselves and begin with a fresh sheet of paperJoan Didion was forged in California which has always lingered in the imagination as where one goes to dobecome something elseTo Play a New RoleOf California Joan Didion wrote quotWe believed in fresh starts We believed in good luck We believed in the miner who scratched together one last stake and struck the Comstock LodequotAnd all of us may have our internal or external CaliforniaBut in the end she believed it was not continuously leaving but staying and putting down roots that matteredIt is as much as what we bring to a place and make of it as it makes of usquotA place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest remembers it most obsessively wrenches it from itself shapes it renders it loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own quotAnd true contentment comes down when one finds a place to put down roots to stay and to fix whatever goes wrongquotYou have to pick the places you don39t walk away fromquotIt does not only take courage to leave a place but courage to stayThe Reality of LossIf there are three realities to life they are learning love and loss Not everybody succeeds at learning or love but everybody gets a graduate degree in loss and a doctorate when people very close dieJoan Didion wrote two books on the loss of her husband quotThe Year of Magical Thinkingquot and her daughter quotBlue Nightsquot which are read by many dealing with lossShe wrote of the fragility of life noting that her husband died while eating dinner quotLife changes fast Life changes in the instant You sit down to dinner and life as you know it endsquot and the loneliness afterwards quotA single person is missing for you and the whole world is emptyquotAnd as time moves forward and people places and hopes come and go people are shaped by what is no morequotWe are imperfect mortal beings aware of that mortality even as we push it away failed by our very complication so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn for better or for worse ourselves As we were As we are no longer As we will one day not be at allquotBut in the end Didion notes we go on by forging new stories and finding new places and begin forgettingquotWe forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget We forget the loves and the betrayals alike forget what we whispered and what we screamed forget who we werequotBut one must forge aheadamp8230quotDo not whine Do not complain Work harder Spend more time alonequotAnd to college graduates a few years ago she made the case for living deeplyamp8230quotI39m not telling you to make the world better because I don39t think that progress is necessarily part of the package I39m just telling you to live in it Not just to endure it not just to suffer it not just to pass through it but to live in it To look at it To try to get the picture To live recklessly To take chances To make your own work and take pride in it To seize the moment And if you ask me why you should bother to do that I could tell you that the grave39s a fine and private place but none I think do there embrace Nor do they sing there or write or argue or see the tidal bore on the Amazon or touch their children And that39s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at itquotClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet

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Story. Place. Loss. -- The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past

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Rishad Tobaccowala

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