Six-word memoirs and our life stages.
I recently came across a website called Six Word Memoirs. The challenge as the title suggests, is to summarise your life’s story in six words. On the one hand I baulked and wondered the superficial, instant noodle, TikTok culture we are to try to summarise our lives in six words. But then on the other hand…
Like many people who come across this challenge of writing a memoir in six words, I had to have a go. There are many humorous, touching, examples on the webpage submitted by people from different cultures, ages and walks of life. Some of the memoirs are witty and so well written -everyone knows how difficult it is to write succinctly so in a way this is the ultimate challenge for writers.
Could you write your six-word memoir?
However the more I tried to craft my little contribution to this wonderfully humane experiment, the more difficult I found it. Which me would I tell the story of? The child – open to anything, a dreamer and innocently philosophical? Or the teenage me – so dysfunctional, angsty and morose? Perhaps the middle-aged me – married, uncomfortably comfortable, wondering about what is next? Is there an overarching theme or story that summarises all of my life yet knowing my life is not over, also includes my desire for what is yet to come? How do I do this in six words? Apparently Hemingway’s 6 word memoir was “For sale: baby shoes , never worn.” Go figure.
How would you frame your story? If you were to write a book about your life what would it be called? And what would be the chapter headings?
Many have tried to segment the trajectory of our life-stories as we live them. Carl Jung famously wrote about the four stages of life – The Athlete, The Warrior, The Statement, The Spirit. Mystics have also tried to categorise the various experiences along life’s journey. I especially like The Way of the Pilgrim by an anonymous author written in Tsarist Russia. In a podcast Tuning to the Mystics James Finely categories the stages of this pilgrim. They are the Quickening, Longing, the Teacher, the Path, Surrender, Fulfilment and Divinity of ordinary life. I resonate with this because it’s a pilgrim’s journey of a search for meaning and union with That which is Beyond (God, the universe, Love).
I love framing our life story using the word pilgrimage and describing ourselves as pilgrims. It’s an old-fashioned word that conjures up images of medieval monks walking through winding mountainous pathways experiencing all sorts of life-changing encounters and wrestling with manifestations of the numinous. However many have pointed to the yearnings in contemporary society to return to the old notion of pilgrimage -just look at the ever popular Camino -an ancient walk yet still so relevant and well-trodden today.
Author and Poet David Whyte says;
Pilgrim is a word that accurately describes the average human being: someone on their way somewhere else, but someone never quite knowing whether the destination or the path stands first in importance; someone who, underneath it all, doesn’t quite understand from whence their next bite of bread will come; someone dependent on help from absolute strangers and from those who travel with them. Most of all, a pilgrim is someone abroad in a world of impending revelation, where something is about to happen, including, most fearfully, and as part of their eventual arrival, their own disappearance.
It has made me think a lot about the different components of our story and how that story unfolds. Sometimes pilgrimage can sound solitary or lonely. It can also seem as though we are on a continually uphill climb of self-improvement. However we all know that life isn’t like that. We move forward but experience the ebb and flow of life – beauty and terror. We do to others and we are done to; some of those experiences and our reactions are life-giving and others not so. We wrestle with our dark or shadow side, we try and control our life story knowing full well that this is futile. We like to make ourselves the hero of the story when we know how much others walk with us and shape us into the people we are becoming.
Whyte writes about this journey towards humility beautifully;
The great measure of human maturation is the increasing understanding that we move through life in the blink of an eye; that we are not long with the privilege of having eyes to see, ears to hear, a voice with which to speak, and arms to put round a loved one; that we are simply passing through. We are creatures made real through contact, meeting, and then moving on; creatures who, strangely, never get to choose one above the other. Human life is contact, getting to know, and a moving beyond which is forever changing, from the transformations that enlarge and strengthen us to the ones that turn us from consuming to being consumed, from seeing to being semi-blind, from speaking in one voice to hearing in another.
Today, my six-word memoir would be;
“A pilgrim brimming with questions and longings.”
But I’m sure this will change soon enough as I reflect on my other personal iterations.
What about you? What would be your six-word memoir? And do you see yourself as a pilgrim? If not, what other images would you use to describe your life journey?
Rev. Dr Karina Kreminski, Mission Catalyst – Formation and Fresh Expressions, Uniting Mission and Education. Karina also blogs at An Ordinary Mystic.
