LifeStory Briefs

What is a LifeLine?

Your LifeLine is simply a chronological listing of the most important events of your life, with the year (perhaps also the month) in which they occurred. Here is an example of a LifeLine that covers a 33-year period. The writer hasn't made any effort to describe these significant events, simply to note them down. This schematic format forces us to choose the most important moments of our lives, which often mark the beginnings and endings of important chapters. We don't want to tell our life story chronologically (there's no more sure way to boredom!) but it is often helpful to understand the chronology of our lives. As you work with the LifeLine-writing down important life passages and recalling what happened at the time-you will understand more about what was going on in your mind and heart when you made the choices that shaped your future (now your past).

Alice's LifeLine
1940	my birth
1947	1st grade, parents' divorce
1958	HS graduation
May, 1961	Married Tom
1965	Divorce/started college
1971	Began teaching
1973	Moved to Idaho

Developing Your LifeLine

So you've created your LifeLine-what next? How will you use it? One of the most helpful things you can do at this point is to expand and develop your LifeLine by noting down some of the important elements of each event. Here are several ways you might do this.

• For each major event you have listed, write down three events that led up to it, then three events that followed from it. When you've written these down, think for a few moments about how these causes and effects worked together. Then write down your thoughts.
• For each major event, write down the names of the people who were involved in it with you, and what their roles were. Take a moment to look back on the people who contributed so much to these vital turning points, then write a paragraph about each of them.
• For each major event, write down what you consider to be the two or three most negative implications of it, and the two or three most positive. Then write down its long-term implications, looking at it from your current perspective, with the wonderful wisdom of hindsight.

Passages

Gail Shehey has written several books about the "passages" in our lives: stages of individual growth marked by important events that many of us share in common. Some of these passages (such as menarche and menopause) take place only once and at relatively fixed points of our lives, while others (losing loved ones through death or separation, establishing new relationships, entering and leaving careers) can take place at any time and at many times. Looking back at your LifeLine, what "passages" can you find? Try giving a name to them. (Sheehy's clever titles included the Trying 20s, the Catch-30s, the Forlorn 40's.) What boundaries mark each of these periods? How does each of your LifeLine events change these boundaries?

Growing: From There to Here

The dates and one- or two-word descriptions in your LifeLine can't begin to tell the whole story of your life, which is all about growth. Think of each of the major events in your life as a "lesson" in the life-long curriculum of learning to live more fully and to be a more complete human being. What did you learn from each of these experiences? In what important ways did you grow from it? In what ways did it change you?