Today we had a post-covid visit with a friend we hadn’t seen for a long time. This is an eighty-something woman with a curious and sharp mind whose body is letting her down.
As she talked, I reflected on her basic posture toward life, and how most people I know don’t take the stance she does. It’s more nuanced than calling her an optimist.
In the metaphor of storytelling, I began wondering about meta-stories. Are there certain stories that function as primary, organizing, hermeneutical principles through which other stories are told? Does each of us have one of these meta-stories which colours how we interpret the data? Would identifying a group of meta-stories be a useful tool for self-understanding and self-observation, or would it amount to another way to define others by categorizing them and reducing them to a type?
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