Are there ways that the narrative metaphor is useful in approaching your own work? For example, is there a story that comes to mind that demonstrates multi- stories? Any reflections on what you might have learned “the hard way” about single storied assumptions that might do well to be re-examined?
Yes there are several such stories of hope that demonstrate existence of myriad possibilities. India, to which I belong, is in itself a kaleidoscope of multi-stories in its several religions offering hope in a rainbow of rich folk tales. A common tendency of Indians which I have been a witness to is subscription to determinism or fatalism as reaction to the aftermath of misfortune. When a marriage experiences strain the community medicine of support is sometimes replaced with aggravation of the strain by running the narrative of birth-based incompatibility between the married couple as a determined astrological fate which must necessarily end with the partition of the couple as the remedy. This would be unfortunate but for the several other narratives again in India and around the world: the medicines to such fatalistic thinking in narratives of hope, of which of particular interest to me has been a narrative called “Liaofan’s Four Lessons” by Yuan Liaofan of the Ming dynasty: a powerful antidote to fatalism, the true example of which narrative lives in the successful entrepreneur today by the name of Mr. Kazuo Inamori of Japan.