January Prompts for Inventing a Life

It's not about starting over, but starting from here

"All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them," wrote Ursula K. Le Guin. "We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people."

I keep coming back to the word: invent. Not discover (though there's plenty to uncover). Not fabricate (though we all perform). But to produce something through imagination, experimenting, and willingness to put unlikely things together and see what happens.

January looms. Maybe the pressure to improve or reinvent in some capacity feels loud. Maybe you’re questioning how you got to the place you’re at. No matter, I’m interested in:

• Invention as ongoing practice.

• Active authorship (rather than passive reception or assumed constraints).

• The way we make do with what we have, transforming what’s given into what’s chosen.

• The tension between what we carefully craft and what we let find us.

• Granular choices that accumulate into patterns.

• From Georges Perec's "Species of…