In May 2024, I woke up early in the morning in Steven’s house in Bruge. Light gleamed through the window. The Belgian landscape formed before my eyes. But my attention was drawn to the window frame. I realized, firstly, that my view was framed by the window frame, and secondly, that my view would not be the view that it was without that frame. In my meandering reflections, I jumped to the notions that a story, too, is a kind of perceptual frame, that our lives are stories, and that, in these postmodern, fragmented times, it is necessary to make the case for stories with clearer frames, with more integrated lucidities. Not that I need to make a case for them; consciousness is structured through the perceptual frame of a story.

The Buddhist teachings on dependent origination and anatta do not undermine this feature of consciousness. The reality that we perceive through consciousness – as a story – is not reality as such, only one limited view onto it (our own). How to take our stories seriously, to test them out, to feel out their emotional implications, while holding onto the knowledge that they are models of reality, not reality itself: maps, not the territory.

But I made a pledge in Steven’s house in Bruge that morning to inhabit my story more fully, to dedicate myself to it, to feel the intensity and misery and joy of it fully, to realize that any meaning and substance in my life, any ballast that I build my life upon, will emerge out of this story, even as I maintain an awareness of the ultimate emptiness (in the Buddhist sense) of this story at the same time.

I have one story. There are some important chapters left to write. Make them count.