The Streaming Narrative

This is the first of what will likely be several follow-ups to Nature, Nurture, Narrative.

The reference piece for this post is, well, a little different...

So, as you move along in life, you`re engaging a constant stream of mental action, much of it built around defining and redefining the situation, your self and your role, the roles of others relative to you, and objects. This is your narrative.

Now, the reference above (and the term narrative itself) are obviously distorted; we plainly don`t narrate every piece of what we`re thinking and doing to ourselves quite like that. But what we actually do is similar in all the right ways for this to be a sense-making way to discuss it.

A situation arises.

You assess the situation, as it is presented to you through your natural senses and nurtured conditioning, and attach meaning to it by means of your ongoing narrative. These meanings are generally decided by habit (apples are usually food, not thrown weapons), but meanings can be shifted as needed.

The past informs this narrative with habitual meanings, memories of past pains and pleasures, associations of all sorts. The future likewise informs the narrative. We imagine the reactions of others and of objects, as well as of total systems. We can plan around them. And all of this is intimately tied in with goals. Finish the essay, have lunch, win the game, find love, share the big idea, get away with all of it for another day.

Now, some fun ideas that fly out from this...

• When you operate entirely off conditioning or reflex, you`re not wholly you. Sometimes this is awful; too much of it, and you feel like your life is robotic. Other times, it can be deeply needed - doing something familiar to relax and hang your brain up for a while.

• Your narrative can act as a tool for rationalization just as easily as a tool for comprehension. You can take actions you don`t even understand, justifying them after the fact by describing them differently as you flow along.

• If you want to understand someone in more than an imagined fashion, you can`t do it in a pick-apart way. You need to engage their narrative - you might even need to effectively submerge into it. If that`s true, the act of understanding someone fully will almost always be transformative for the person doing the understanding.