Telling how? Living how?

144 words

I used to feel so sure that Didion was right, that every story we tell tells us how to live, but now I wonder if that aphorism might be one of those phrases with just the right timbre of truth to pass for it—we tell ourselves stories in order to live— a pocketknife statement with so many uses that it almost ceases to have any meaning at all.

Telling how, living how? Stories of what sort? The prepositional phrase “in order” suggests an oversight somewhere, a proper procedure or a logic that I’m not sure we entirely have in our control when it comes to the narratives we hold close.

Though perhaps Didion’s phrase accounts for that, too, or maybe it doesn’t matter whether the phrase itself is stable; perhaps it’s just a story being told, bending to attend to our mercurial lives.