Krista Tippett: “You said in adulthood when something really big happens to you, you either just kind of assimilate it into the preexisting story that you’ve been living by, or you accommodate and you make room for this experience, and your story shifts.“
The following quotes are all Sara Hendren:
“My dear friend and colleague John Adler studies narrative identity in adulthood… And he taught me this kind of, that we make stories of our lives as a biological imperative… We need to tell stories that do make sense over time of how we got to where we are… it’s a feature of, really, how we exist. There’s genetic factors, and there’s nurture, environmental factors, and then there’s this story-making.”
“Disability is needfulness.”
“[Needfulness] is temporal and changing and over the lifespan.”
“What shall we build?”
“…have wrested my husband and me from the grip of rigid time.”
“…that atypical way of maneuvering through time, yes, has helped all of us in our family to see what are we attached to in our worth and what will we do? How will we build the kind of lives that we want?”
“…making friends with that slowness and trying to ask ourselves, “Well, what is the hurry about? Do we want our lives subsumed by our economic worth?” Again, none of this is to say that we don’t, in a realistic way, live in a time in which we work for money. Yes, I get it. But, the invitation is also to ask what are our lives about.”
On Being, Sara Hendren - Our Bodies, Awareness, and the Built World
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Further reading:
What Can a Body Do? by: Sara Hendren
Sara Hendren on Substack
Engineering at Home Project
