Finding The Shape of Your Life

We have been taught that this is the basic shape of a story:

This is the type of story we long to hear. We crave the rising action and a climactic event. The falling action shows us how different things are now that the event has happened and a resolution helps us make sense of the journey. We feel satisfied. But what about the story of our lives?

I have heard it said that a person ‘peaked’ in highschool and it was all downhill from there. Today’s North American culture is obsessed with youth accomplishments, sometimes at the detriment of the adult they become. There is less value placed on the benefits of time and the gradual climb. Will their accomplishments ever be good enough when the only two directions in life according to this structure are up or down?

What about the people that live a life of warm, soft waves, never feeling worthy because there hasn’t been an ‘peak’ at all? Do they not have a ‘good’ story?

There are many barriers to achievement for those who want to change careers later in life. The dream may be even more difficult to imagine because that is the time the story arc ‘should’ be sliding towards a beautiful resolution.

The triangle may be a classic story arc, but it is not the shape of life.

Celebrated author Diana Gabaldon explains in her blog that her very complex stories have different shapes, from three overlapping, inverted triangles, to the shape of a braided horse tail.

Try to imagine your life in shapes that do not involve a single peak embraced by two low valleys, a life with many story lines, with many new peaks and vales to come. You can explore this idea in a meditation session, a journaling exercise, or a date with a drawing pad under a tree. What are your peaks and valleys, your ups and downs? Where have you rested, where did you cocoon, where did you blaze ahead or expand? What shape has your life taken so far?

I believe mine may be a spiral ascending, getting closer to the middle, to the heart of it all. Even as I felt I was going around and around, I knew I was ascending. The climb has been dizzying but the time I have taken to get to where I am has been integral to the journey. The other shape I see is a sphere. I ‘start over again’ by making a change in my life, driving for success, only to come full circle back at the same place, the same lesson. Then, I begin again. Every time around, I spin another part of the sphere, reenforcing it with all of my efforts and learning.

Gabaldon explains that she rarely knows the shape of a story until it is sufficiently written. If it is hard to see the shape of things, have you given yourself the permission to continue to craft your story? Regardless of where you are on your journey, perhaps the greatest gift you can give yourself is time. I look forward to seeing how this perspective affects how I coach my teens through career planning.

I believe your are important. My three wishes for you would be: that you have faith in the possibilities, never try to fit your journey into a shape that doesn’t fit, and never decide your story is fixed when you still have so much more to write.

Wishing you strength and care as you find your shape of things… xo