I left you yesterday with the thought that maybe our beliefs are structured from our stories, and I’ll stretch it now to perhaps our stories are also structured from our beliefs.

As a college student years ago, I studied Jorge Luis Borges, and I was completely fascinated by his narratives of the “I” and of our identities. As I read his short stories, I became convinced that our identities are structured entirely by every second of our life experience – those that we remember clearly, those that we don’t, those that we’d like to forget, those that we deem significant, those that don’t appear so significant – the list could go on. It includes every second of our lives. This is why we can’t ever truly, completely know ourselves. It’s impossible to remember every single tiny second of our lives.

These seconds, and the memories (remembered or forgotten) are our stories. They are also what form our beliefs. It follows that our beliefs and stories and irreversibly intertwined, and our beliefs are most certainly structured from our stories.

Does that make our stories structured from our beliefs?

Considering that our personal histories, whether it be our parent’s heritage or a singular experience that made us think one way or another, form these specific beliefs, you can also say that our stories inform our beliefs, that they are the lens through which our beliefs develop. Our beliefs then become the lens through which we explore the world, through which we interpret others’ behaviors, and through which we interpret everything that happens to us.

Our beliefs and our stories are inextricably intertwined, and are often one and the same.

Thoughts?