“I — I’m a little girl,” said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day.

“A likely story indeed!” said the pigeon in a tone of the deepest contempt.

A CHORUS OF VOICES “Once upon a time” is how our stories begin. The events unfold in a placeless place that could be here, in a timeless time that could be now. But no matter how old or often told, every good story opens like a door into the meaning and mystery of our lives.

We inherited the stories from people so much like us they might have been earlier incarnations. In all the sacred texts, the ancient histories, the myths and legends handed down — the dead speak to us. The words in our heads are their words. Their language did not outlive them as lists of words and rules of grammar. It lives in the form of our stories.

Everyone thinks they’re modern. We all live on the cutting edge of the present, and always have. But unless you invented your language this morning you are thinking about today and tomorrow using yesterday’s words, many of them first spoken long ago. Acknowledging this does not diminish you, it enlarges you. To hear in your imagination the chorus of voices that passed their storied language along to you is to feel a gratitude blessed with grandeur. Their voices have not fallen silent as long as you are adding yours.

EVERYTHING CONNECTS Meaning is what we want, the thread of significance, the pattern that connects events into stories. Here are two events: the queen died and the king died. Because there is no connection suggested we lean forward, thinking there must be more. We expect a story to satisfy our curiosity and not just be a random report. The queen died and the king died of heartbreak. Oh, we nod, I see. Now we’re in the realm of story, where our need to understand is answered. And it’s a real need, a hunger. Unsatisfied, how can we feel but meaningless?

Everything is interconnected and interchanging. Every moment the world spends itself completely. Nothing is left over, nothing is held back. Creation is spontaneous and complete. Nothing would exist at all if everything didn’t exist just the way it is, constantly transforming into the pattern of events it is just about to be. Our bodies know this firsthand, and the vast majority of our mind that is not conscious. We know it the way we know how to digest our food and circulate our blood and breathe. But our conscious minds are relatively new here, and have some catching up to do.

In the meantime, stories hint that the meaningful connections we’re always looking for are always looking for us. A good story confirms our deep intuition of interconnection and encourages our longing to know it in the full light of consciousness.

Though everything connects, the crazy notion that everything is separate predominates in this culture. As though each aspect of this blooming and buzzing, synergistically arising world existed somehow in an existential vacuum, hoovered out of its inextricable niche by abstract thought. Because words are separate on a page, we think the things they stand for are separate too. But once you assume there are gaps between things you’ve lost touch. Gradually the gaps widen more and more and reality seems to recede. Then you need a good story to bring it back.

UNANIMOUS DREAMING Myths are collective dreams, tapestries woven out of a whole culture’s imagination. Individual dreams thread their way through individual stories. You only know you were dreaming after you wake up.

A moment can last a lifetime in a dream. A life can take place between one heartbeat and the next. Memory is just as capricious. Some events of long ago seem like they just happened, and if you turned around right now you could still catch them fading into the past. But some events seem so remote they might have happened to someone else. When do you wake up from your memories?

Imagine you dreamed you woke up as a different person. At first you’re a little dazed, like when you woke up this morning. But then you’re looking out through their eyes at things they’re familiar with. You’re remembering their memories, feeling their feelings, thinking their thoughts, putting on their clothes and caught up in their daily routine.

The morning proceeds. You know which keys open which doors, how to drive their car, how to do their job as well as they do, where to go for lunch. After work you fit right into their personal life, relate to their friends and family. You laugh at the jokes they think are funny and are bored or aroused or angered by the same things they are. Soon enough you’re yawning and it’s time for bed. But you’re never really aware of falling asleep, are you?

Say you wake up as someone else again. You don’t remember who you were the day before because your past life is not a part of this new person’s memory. You wake up as them and only know what they know. You spend another eventful day where everything is new yet somehow familiar and the day turns into night and so to bed.

Again you wake up as a different person. Same forgetting, same mix of the strange and the familiar, same falling asleep unawares. And again it happens, and again. You have no way of knowing how many times because your waking up is your forgetting. Twenty times? A hundred? Seven billion?

If there are times when the strange and the familiar get mixed up, when déjà vu meets jamais vu and they wink at each other conspiratorially, those moments pass like all the rest. The present is continually opening up right under your feet. Like everyone else, sometimes you’re falling, sometimes you’re flying, sometimes you’re teetering on the brink.

Why all this fuss about one self per person? Everyone feels they are “I”. Everyone knows what it’s like to wake up a little dazed and see the world take familiar shape again. Maybe we’re all the same “I” having the experience of being this particular human being in this place at this moment. Maybe we’re unanimous and each of us in a way is all of us. And when you fall asleep for the last time, you won’t even know it. Because you’ll be waking up again and forgetting like you’ve done so many times before. Maybe life is not a dream at all, but separate stories of separate identities are a dream. And therefore death is. Maybe dying is waking up from your memories as someone else, as everyone else.

FALLOPIAN FISH LADDER A culture’s past is remembered in its stories, its history and folklore, and each member’s biography draws from it and adds to it. All our stories weave together into the text and context of our lives. Where does your story begin? Your DNA knows you intimately, but do you know it? Would you even recognize it at the lost and found?

“I’m sorry, friend, if you can’t identify this DNA, I can’t turn it over to you. Next!”

Imagine you were born in the future when prospective parents have their genes screened for undesirable traits and unacceptable quirks and refashioned to fit the current style. Even then there will be misfits with a strange fashion sense and wild ideas about surprise and serendipity. Imagine that some of these outlaws hack into the DNA database and mix everything up so one baby gets the pale blue eyes another one would have gotten, or the perfect pitch, or the mad wit, or the aversion to logic, or the predisposition toward gloomy thoughts, or the irresistible attraction to the sea. So all their innate traits and talents, strengths and weaknesses would be shuffled before they’re dealt. It’s probably just as well you were born when you were, before these random revolutionaries turn human reproduction into a game of chance.

Now imagine your genesis. One moment the world was booming along, minding its own business, doing everything it could possibly do without you. The next moment one very excited spermatozoa launched himself into the current of events, leaping like a lovesick salmon up a Fallopian fish ladder, and plunged head over curly tail into the most beautiful and welcoming ovum in the world. Sperm and egg spun their threads of chromosomes into a double helix and the two became a one.

That’s when you were a zygote, remember? Those were the days. Nothing to do but bask and soak in life, like floating in your own private hot tub sipping fruity drinks with little paper umbrellas in them.

But it couldn’t last. Pretty soon – what was that? – you started to divide and subdivide. And multiply. Do you identify with that deliriously duplicating cluster of cells? Was that really you? Were you an it in the beginning? When did you switch from at it to an I?

Your genesis was a blooming and a ripening. The world bore you like a fruit tree bears fruit, or a nut tree bears nuts. This, or something like this, would be an important part of your story if it was part of your memory. But your true story is much more than your remembered story. It’s more than you ever knew or ever will.

In your first nine months or so you made a human being from scratch. You grew organs and nerves, muscles and bones, fingers and toes. You made your eyes in color before you’d ever seen color. You made them so that years later, among other things, you could see these words and read this sentence about how you made your own eyes. You want magic, miracle, mystery? You’re looking at it.

You will never be able to explain how you did this. There will never come a time when you stop what you’re doing, look up with a dawning expression, snap your fingers and say, “Now I remember! That’s how I did it!” Never.

LIGHTLESS MOLLUSK MAZE Because interdependence is inter-identity, the true story of the you who made your body is the story of the whole universe. In his famous example Carl Sagan explained why this is so. “To make an apple pie from scratch,” he said, “first you have to create the universe.”

You did not materialize here one day as if teleported from some mysterious other dimension any more than the first apple pie popped into existence out of nowhere. Apples imply apple trees, soil, sun, seasons, clouds, wind, rain, the biosphere, the earth, gravity, the whole catastrophe. Dough implies wheat fields, seeds, fertilizer, insecticides, farmers, combines, diesel fuel, oil fields, perpetual war. Cinnamon probably implies Sri Lanka, nutmeg Indonesia, salt Lot’s wife. Baking implies the history of cooking back to the discovery of fire. There is no end to this because every thing implies everything, and we are each as implicit as anything else. We’re all in this together, as interconnected as Mom and apple pie.

Reading is not a conscious process either. How you actually turn these stick figures into words into language into thoughts is a mystery to your same-old-story self. Speaking of working in the dark with an expertise you can’t explain, a lot is going on right now in the blind folds of your brain. The godzillions of cells that live out their lives in that lightless mollusk maze are busy. Chances are what they’re up to is a complete mystery to you.

But the you that is translating these words into meaningful thoughts is the you who made your body from scratch. That you is so fundamental, so ever-present and reliable, that your ego – the image that fits the story you’ve been told and tell yourself – takes it completely for granted and never acknowledges it. We don’t even have a commonly agreed upon name for it.

One of ego’s peculiarities is that, being unaware of the vast spectrum of our non-conscious activities, it is only concerned with the very narrow band of so-called consciousness that it can brag about. Because you cannot say how you made your body doesn’t mean you didn’t make it. You can’t say how you do almost everything you do.

But so what? Migrating birds can’t say how they get there without maps. Centipedes can’t say how they know which leg to move first. Ostriches can’t say what they see in the sand. We’re the only animals who need to explain ourselves in words. And we don’t even have a word for who we really are.

That’s the real mystery. The stories we tell to try to explain who we are change from place to place, from time to time. Language changes and culture changes, so thinking changes. There have been many different ways of knowing who we are. Now we think we’re separate from the rest of the universe, cut off somehow though nobody knows how. And fundamentally different though nobody knows why. But that’s just a story we’ve been told and tell ourselves. Some stories are better than others. That one sucks.

Regardless of the stories we tell, we have always been inextricably interconnected with everything else. To make a human being from scratch, you must first create the universe. The you who thinks your thoughts in the dark, wet world of your brain, the you who made your body in the dark, wet womb that was your world back then, is the same you who thinks everyone’s thoughts and makes everyone’s body. The universe is not a what, it’s a who. And it’s you.

HITCHHIKING POSSIBILITIES Where does your story begin and end in the lives of others? Think of the people who’ve been important to you – parents, teachers, mentors, friends, rivals, lovers, maybe children. Among them, unseen, are many more you never met, never even heard of.

Someone in the admissions office approved your college application and passed it along. Without that person you might have gone to a different school, made different friends, had different advisors. You might have been drawn to an alternate course of study and set off on a different course through life.

There are possibilities at every intersection looking for a ride. You might have won that contest you entered. You might have had a recurring dream as a child that pulled you in another direction. Many events that seem inevitable, looking back, would have seemed impossible looking forward.

What about that distracted driver headed toward the car you were riding in who almost turned left across your path? You never even noticed him. But that summer when you were nineteen your right arm could have been in a cast for a month and you could have learned the left hand parts to several classic boogie woogie tunes which sparked your interest in swing music that led indirectly to your meeting the following summer with the woman who hired you at the restaurant where you became friends with that crazy kid whose mother introduced you to the great love of your life who would have dumped you on Christmas morning and left a hole in your heart that no one else could ever fill.

The actions of others have always been essential to the twists and turns your story took and most of these actions were invisible to you. In the same way much of the influence you’ve had on the lives of others is unknowable. The hidden consequences of our actions far outnumber the obvious. The unlikeliest links show up in the chains of events all the time. I mean, boogie-woogie! — who could have seen that coming? Yet events no less likely have been turning points in everyone’s life. Coincidences we’d dismiss as implausible in fiction happen every day in fact.

Our actions have consequences in each others’ lives that we can rarely predict or trace. And since everything at every moment is changing into everything in the next moment forever, we cannot know how far our actions will reach. We have no boundaries in the lives of others. Everyone is made of everyone else.

SECOND THOUGHTS Imagine the ways the story of your life might have turned out differently. Think of all the plans you made that went nowhere and all the life-changing events that came out of nowhere. How could you have known that he would turn up? What were the odds she would be there? Looking back the odds don’t matter. Looking back all bets are off. Still, you might wonder.

If only you’d accepted that invitation.

If only you hadn’t taken that job, that vacation, that phone number.

If only you’d been taller.

If only you hadn’t given it all away.

If only you’d taken the giblets out before you baked that turkey.

If only you’d had a photographic memory.

If only you’d left about three drinks earlier.

If only you’d never promised.

If only you’d taken a later flight.

If only you hadn’t been so damned clever.

If only you’d gotten into the other car.

If only you’d learned another language.

If only you hadn’t taken that dance class.

If only you’d held out for another year, month, minute.

If only you’d stayed home that night.

If only you had called tails.

If only you’d said yes instead of no.

If only you’d never worn that feather boa.

If only you’d learned to play the banjo.

If only you hadn’t winked at that cop.

If only you’d never seen that hot air balloon.

If only you hadn’t teased that dog.

If only you’d gotten a fourth wish.

If only you’d believed her.

When you look back do you feel any regrets? Do you assume that’s natural? You might be confusing natural with normal. Why be normal? Here’s a trick you can play on fate and normalcy. Think of this as a magic formula, eight simple words that can radically transform regret. And all you have to do is pretend you mean them. Seriously. Say these words three times as if you mean them. Repeat as often as necessary.

“Thanks for everything. I have no regrets whatever.”