The Fruits of Knowing

   The interesting thing about learning and knowing is that we often only see the results, and the results don't always convey the process. Well, take, for example, the biopic. Biopics are stories of people's lives that have been made into movies. You can be certain that they've been edited for the consumption of the viewer, and often they are designed to inspire people to do similar things in their lives. One problematic aspect of most biopics is that they don't convey the often mundane or boring waiting moments when one's thoughts are not yet formed and there is a sense of indirection. It's interesting how this works, because when the movie is being scripted, there is a sense of an ending that you don't get when you actually live that experience. At times, when biographers narrate their experiences, they don't distinguish between the experience of "living it but not knowing the outcome" and "standing in the future, looking back, and knowing what it means." Meaning itself happens over multiple time frames which is not often felt when it is actually being lived.
   I wonder if sometimes, the rush to turn our lives into stories can blur the agonizing uncertainty that comes from processing experiences. Processing experiences is never an easy thing, and there is no single interpretation that neatly fits it. Is there really a person "standing over" the experience who understands it all along (the omnipotent narrator), even when the felt experience contains no such certainty?
   The confusion that I feel is that of wondering if there is a controlling narrator to one's life story. For some, it's God that makes sense of stories, because the divine creator ensures a place where our book has a binding, a specific shelf in the library, and a beginning, middle and end. In the absence of such a sense of a creator, we write our own stories, with the faith that the stories make coherent sense. As one reaches the end of one of life's chapters, one can neatly wrap up the previous experiences, narrating a single overriding theme to it. But what happens when, in a person's journey, there is no theme at all? In those situations, where do we go? Can the desire to find a controlling theme sometimes be a source of suffering? Perhaps we need to go beyond stories themselves to find the answers.