A Place in Time
- Dr. Tom Wagner
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
We make meaning long before we realize we’re doing it. This reflection invites you to slow down enough to notice the stories forming in you right now.
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A Place in Time
Last week’s article made this claim:
“…the scaffolding that forms and holds human personality is made up of stories. Likewise, …the foundational stories that we hold, either consciously or unconsciously, serve as lenses through which we interpret our experience. In turn, the influence of those stories bends the trajectory of our decisions.”
This week, I’m thinking about how our place in history forms and shapes the stories that form and shape us. I’ve got history on the mind because, for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been listening to Doris Kearns Goodwin's best-selling, Team of Rivals, about the life and times of Abraham Lincoln and his Cabinet. Lisa, my wife, has been subjected to overhearing it…a lot. In not so many words, she asked me why I’d want to listen to an unabridged history class instead of something more normal and entertaining, like a football game or music? I answered her that Kearns Goodwin knows how to turn history into something that reads more like an exciting novel than a college course. My deeper answer was that I find inspiration and hope for these divisive times when I read about how our country made it through those divisive times.
I’ve been noticing how hanging out with Kearns Goodwin in the mid-Nineteenth Century has got me thinking about how a person’s place in history influences how they make meaning in the world. The hundred years that passed between the time Lincoln died and I was born saw bigger changes in Western Civilization’s self-understanding than maybe anytime in human history. Just consider the tectonic shifts in thinking required to absorb Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and then Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. One changed the way we saw ourselves in the created order. The other changed the way we saw the universe. Karl Marx shifted the ground underneath how we thought about work. Sigmund Freud changed the way we thought of consciousness and the emotional life, paving the way for my profession, and also paving the way to what Robert Bellah (Habits of the Heart) called, the creation of a “therapeutic culture.” Two brutal World Wars would usher in the American Century. Those wars, and their unimaginable savagery, would also contribute to the philosophical innovation of post-modernism. On the one hand, this movement created a way to put the lie to social constructions that masquerade as objective truths (e.g. The Third Reich’s eugenics theories). On the other hand, post-modernism also contributed to the untethering of the intellectual and moral life from a concern for objective truth. Sounds pretty esoteric until you hear a ubiquitous lack of concern for facticity in leaders, politicians, pundits, and social media mavens.
Back to the Future
About the time that Abraham Lincoln moved to Springfield, Illinois, my great, great-grandpa, Michael Fuhrman, would have been farming just south of that small city of 1500 residents. I suspect that if I could journey back in history to show my ancestors the changes that the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries would bring, I doubt they’d care that much about the things I listed in the last paragraph. I’d bet that Grandpa Mike would be marveling at the modern conveniences that would one day make life so much easier, and death so much less ever-present. I also suspect that he’d be overwhelmed at the pace of Twenty-First Century life.
While reading Kearns Goodwin's book, it occurred to me that Nineteenth-Century life had a kind of meditative quality built into it. Transportation by bipedal or equine locomotion has a way of slowing a body down, leaving you alone with your thoughts. The chores would have been harsh, but methodical, and quiet (factories wouldn’t have made it to my prairie hometown by then). By way of contrast, the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries shook the quiet out of everything. Notice that I didn’t even make time to actually read the book I’ve been talking about. I took it in as an Audiobook. It was the background noise to my chores instead of other background noises, like music or a podcast.
Come to the Quiet
Strangely, one of the seminal thinkers who has influenced my approach to psychotherapy research and practice wasn’t a psychologist at all. Bernard Lonergan was a Twentieth-Century Canadian mathematician who refused to stay in his lane. His philosophical and theological reflections provided me with a missing piece of the puzzle during my graduate studies in counseling psychology. He observed the way that human beings naturally formed stories about the experiences they were having, even before the experiences had concluded. He asserted that careful reflection on the stories we tend to create around our experiences allows us to evaluate their truth and utility. Creating this kind of reflective space is the sine qua non for freedom and change. Official or unofficial psychotherapy is all about selecting the narratives that are more fitted to reality as well as optimal functioning. Practicing the kind of mindfulness that Lonergan advocated requires time, space, and quiet—commodities that have been in short supply since the end of the Nineteenth Century.
The Twenty-First Century has ushered in a weird kind of connectivity that disconnects us from one another and ourselves. Perhaps the most countercultural thing that we can do in our day and age is to…come to the quiet.
Dialogue and Discussion Questions: Longtime SMC readers know that “the Dialogue” section of this article is set aside for a good conversation over a cup of coffee—with a friend, with a group, or just with yourself! As always, feel free to share your reaction or reflection in the “Comments” section below.
What are your daily or weekly rituals that create space for quiet and reflection?
Can you remember a time when you had to discard a story about yourself because it wasn’t true or helpful? How did you do that?
What are your Internet habits? Are they influencing your meaning-making process in a more positive or more negative way? If you need to change this, what structures and support will you put in place for that?
Are there any books that are sacred to you that assist in shaping your stories in a better direction?
What stories do you hope will be told about you when you have left this earth?
Please share with the SMC community your thoughts and/or reflections in the comments below.