in retrospect
my brother raises a question on his blog which has buzzed around in my head for more than 24 hours, so I thought I’d simmer on it for awhile.
He mentions our friend Chad who had one of his most formative experiences in a trip to Australia…he (cryptically) mentions a week in October of 1994 as being formative for him, and then he invites us in:
What week has been most formative in your life?
I commented that I haven’t had any such weeks – but I have had seasons of life which I identify as transformative and revelatory, but ultimately, even in retrospect, they lack a cumulative property.
Instead such months / cycles / seasons / (and frequently) semesters – seem to reform previous insights and directions into wholly other experiences. Directions I had not expected. I don’t want to say that these bursts of discovery and meaning have rendered my life more discontinuous than continuous, but on the other hand…were you to try to turn my life journey into a map, it’d be hard to see a unified direction…
And for me that’s the why the question keeps BUZZING.
When you use a metaphor like “formative” (the original title for this post) – it automatically renders past experiences meaningful in a sort of entelechial way.
In the best scenario – such experiences also render the present eminently more meaningful, congruent and whole.
This is not something just my brother does. I do it. You do it. We do it. I’m convinced that the human capacity to tell-stories-in-order-to-survive…is a quite basic phenomenon – maybe even the MOST basic (sociological) human phenomenon.
I guess its those moments when you find yourself WITHOUT A STORY – that you feel most precarious.
I’m not feeling liminoid right now. David’s question actually provoked me to start thinking about a whole set of stories that render my current life meaningful – but it also provoked me to think about the insufficiencies and partiality of those stories.
Hope today is formative - transformative - revelatory and/or (since it is the Christian Sabbath) full of …
peace~
He mentions our friend Chad who had one of his most formative experiences in a trip to Australia…he (cryptically) mentions a week in October of 1994 as being formative for him, and then he invites us in:
What week has been most formative in your life?
I commented that I haven’t had any such weeks – but I have had seasons of life which I identify as transformative and revelatory, but ultimately, even in retrospect, they lack a cumulative property.
Instead such months / cycles / seasons / (and frequently) semesters – seem to reform previous insights and directions into wholly other experiences. Directions I had not expected. I don’t want to say that these bursts of discovery and meaning have rendered my life more discontinuous than continuous, but on the other hand…were you to try to turn my life journey into a map, it’d be hard to see a unified direction…
And for me that’s the why the question keeps BUZZING.
When you use a metaphor like “formative” (the original title for this post) – it automatically renders past experiences meaningful in a sort of entelechial way.
In the best scenario – such experiences also render the present eminently more meaningful, congruent and whole.
This is not something just my brother does. I do it. You do it. We do it. I’m convinced that the human capacity to tell-stories-in-order-to-survive…is a quite basic phenomenon – maybe even the MOST basic (sociological) human phenomenon.
I guess its those moments when you find yourself WITHOUT A STORY – that you feel most precarious.
I’m not feeling liminoid right now. David’s question actually provoked me to start thinking about a whole set of stories that render my current life meaningful – but it also provoked me to think about the insufficiencies and partiality of those stories.
Hope today is formative - transformative - revelatory and/or (since it is the Christian Sabbath) full of …
peace~
posted by Redbaerd at 8:21 AM
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