The Story of Your Life

Life Lessons from the movies, books, and series we love.

THE POWER OF STORY

November 23, 2021

Why do we tell stories? What is it about the movies, books, tv shows, theater, and comics, that we love that make them so precious to us? What is it we recognize on a subconscious level that we return to our favorite ones again and again?

Stories are guides to life. 

Human beings are narrative creatures. We relate to one another through stories. It’s in our genetic programming. In that sense stories have the power to teach us about ourselves — and about life. Stories are how we make sense of the world.

So why call this blog THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE?

Because the stories that inspire us, from the classic novels to the contemporary tv shows and movies have LIFE LESSONS to teach us. 

The past year, when so much of what we came to think of as normal life was disrupted in ways we are still only beginning to understand, many of us found refuge in movies, tv shows, and books. Just look at the banner year Netflix and Amazon have had for evidence of that.

When I wasn’t taking care of my kids while my wife worked at her job, I was writing and running a business, while my wife took over the responsibilities on the home front. At the end of every long exhausting day, we’d try to find time for ourselves. That often meant watching something together in bed. Old favorites and new stuff we’d never seen before.

Turns out we weren’t alone. People everywhere, stuck inside their homes, took refuge in books, movies, series, (and video games, which have become increasingly dependent on a good story to be successful as much as gameplay. That got me thinking about why these books, shows, and movies mean so much to me, to all of us.

“The keys to life are running and reading. For reading: there have been gazillions of people that have lived before all of us. There's no new problem you could have--with your parents, with school, with a bully. There's no new problem that someone hasn't already had and written about it in a book.” —Will Smith

The structure of this blog is each post will be about a theme, a character, a trait, which will relate to a story from which we can derive a lesson.

In this way, the stories that we love will help us make sense of this unique time in which we all live. The stories we tell influence our journeys, shape who we are, and ultimately, who we will become. They contain the lessons that bring us back onto the proper path as we each write the Story of Our Lives.