Misericordia

Yep, there is no secret formula, no only recipe for all best things.
Q:
Other stories, like the one we sense the girl at the stage door is learning from her mother, become deeply ingrained and in many ways define who we are. We tell ourselves tales about the future: ‘Oh, I’m an awkward misfit who looks terrible and always will.’ Or, ‘I’ll never have a fulfilling relationship.’ Other stories are about the past: ‘I’m like this because my parents treated me in a particular way.’ Or, ‘I’m an unlucky person – always have been.’ Yet our entire past, which we feel (in many ways correctly) is responsible for how we behave today, is itself just a story we are telling ourselves in the here and now. We join the dots to tell one tale when we consider how, for example, we came to this point in our career, another when we consider how we developed our psychological foibles or strengths. It is hard to think about your past without tidying it up into a kind of story: one in which you are cast as the hero or victim. Invariably we ignore the regular dice-rolls of chance or random luck; successful high-flyers are typically prone to ignoring the interplay of blind fortune when they credit their career trajectories to their canny business sense or brute self-belief. We tell the story we want to tell, and we live out those stories every day.
Some of these stories are consciously constructed, but others operate without our knowledge, dictated by scripts handed to us by others when we were young. We can carry around the psychological legacy of our parents for our whole lives, whether bad or good. Where they have unfulfilled wishes and regrets, these are commonly passed to us as a template for storytelling. Many of these templates make it hard for us to feel happy: ‘You must achieve impressive things to be happy/loved.’ Or, ‘You must sacrifice your own happiness to make others feel better: that is the measure of your worth.’ Similar insidious directives can also come from the Church, our peers, classmates and teachers, the cumulative effect of the news media we encounter daily or any number of ideologies in which we find ourselves enmeshed. With these overarching stories or templates in mind, we repeatedly arrange our lives in such a way as to let events and others reinforce the same familiar message, like a child’s fable. Again and again, many people play out the same story: that they surely cannot be easy to love; that love and admiration are dependent on career success; that others will always disappoint us. ‘The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents,’ wrote the legendary psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Whatever we have taken from them, the founding story of our lives, imposed on us by a mother and father who in turn inherited a faulty script from their own parents, isn’t even ours.
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