This blog is called heroes not zombies because I believe we all tend to sleepwalk through life (in a kind of zombie way), but that we have the opportunity to wake up and be the heroes of our own stories. So, I was especially struck by the following passage in “Metaphors we live by” –
Self-understanding requires unending negotiation and renegotiation of the meaning of your experiences to yourself……It involves the constant construction of new coherences in your life, coherences that give new meaning to old experiences. The process of self-understanding is the continual development of new life stories for yourself.
I think this is SO on the button. It grasps the dynamic, creative, ever-changing, ever-growing process of understanding which comes about through telling, editing, revising and re-telling our life stories. These stories are not fantasy of course. Rather they are the process of creating meaning from our experiences. They do this by developing coherences. We continuously strive to make sense of our experiences, and making sense means building on the existing coherent stories we tell about ourselves to make them more coherent in the light of our newest experiences. Additionally, this passage hits the nail on the head by pointing out that the new coherences cast a new light on older experiences. This is the healing potential of understanding.
Myths are the key stories which create our lifeworlds. Myths are not false stories. They are our most fundamental ones. As Lakoff and Johnson say
Myths provide ways of comprehending experience; they give order to our lives. Like metaphors, myths are necessary for making sense of what goes on around us. All cultures have myths, and people cannot function without myth any more than they can function without metaphor.
Are you aware of the metaphors, the myths, the stories which you use to comprehend your experience?
Heroes Not Zombies 
As an English teacher, I find myself constantly evaluating the stories that we tell to understand our existence.
The commonalities of these stories fascinates me, and I once wrote a paper explaining that the reason that we read so much Shakespeare is because almost every human emotion can be found in his works; true love, jealousy, ambition, guilt, fear, compassion, rage, tenderness… really, everything.
As for being aware of my PERSONAL myths and stories, I think I’m less in tune to those than I’d like to be. Or, rather, I’m not terribly concerned with them. I understand my existence to be less about stories and more about emotion and the power behind, within, and around that emotion. It’s something I’m still working on…
[…] like this before, but the next stage is where it gets especially interesting. If you read my post about “Metaphors we live by”, the contrasting of an “objectivist” position with a “subjectivist” one (this latter […]