Life as story.

In my mind I can see the past, vividly and without any sense of reality. I imagine the way life could have been and the way life was. I don’t re-imagine the past purposefully; my mind goes memory-jumping, and I am left as a passive observer of false realities.

I can also see into the future: goodness, happiness, and me working fervently at a computer in an open room with the ethereal sound of rain falling in the city. I walk across the hardwood floor and step outside. Street lights change yellow, red, green and reflect in windshields and puddles on the sidewalk. I breathe deep and go back to my work.

If I were a character in my own story, I would have to ask myself: have I reached the point when a character makes his own choices, free from the writer’s pen and will? Have I taken on a life of my own?

Or am I following a thrid person omnipresent narration that I will and always have been following, regardless of choice or my perception of choice?

Each of us has a story: past, present, future. And our stories are pieced together seemingly random piece by random piece. It feels like so many pieces are missing. It feels like what is happening right now is supposed to and was always going to. It feels like you have a sense or idea of control, but really you have neither.

Will I end up breathing in the rain? Maybe. But the story could always take a turn.

 

 

 

Preserving story.

When you graduate high school, people talk about leaving a legacy. What kind of legacy, I was never sure. Yet it’s true; when we leave, part of us stays behind.

In Chuck Palahniuk’s Diary the narrator says, “We’re all of us immortal. We couldn’t die if we wanted to.” The novel is about how we create our stories in every action, and how this is inescapable. It’s about how even after we die we remain alive in everything we did. And about how we can’t fully die because we’ve left a mark.

Jonathan Harris is giving us the chance to leave our collective mark in the form of a digital time capsule. His Yahoo! Time Capsule, open now, is accepting contributions through November 8, and already includes a vast amount of viewable content. People contribute from all over the world, hoping to capture the story of 2006, and preserve it for future generations.

Generations have being leaving time capsules for a long while. Let’s see, did we bury ours in middle school or elementary? Faulty memory—another reason we need records; another reason to keep a diary. I remember: each student brought an item—the item he thought represented him well—and dumped it into a big, black trash bag. Then we put it in the ground and covered it with dirt. Years later, we dug it up.

Looking back is more than nostalgic. It lets us see who we were and gives us a clue as to who we are.

Today, it’s different. Today we have technology. Harris’s proposal: “You’ll be part of history and witness what others are saying and saving. You’ll have your handiwork presented to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, projected on one of the most famous relics on the planet, AND then beamed along a path of laser light into space.”

How exciting: Each of us has the chance to contribute our story in any form: image, sound, writing, podcast, URL. But what’s really exciting is, we can contribute to the collective story. The story we are telling together, the story that evolves with each individual. If something, a photograph or quote or whatever, represents you, it represents someone else, too, and it should be shared.

I have a few items in mind I’d like to share. And while this isn’t the legacy they talked about in high school, this legacy is far more important. This legacy is much closer to the possibilty of leaving something that will actually matter and connect with someone else.