What is included in a narrative, what is left out and the values it embodies are determined by what cognitive scientist and linguist George Lakoff refers to as ‘frames’. These cognitive structures are shaped by our personal and collective histories and allow us to conceptualize and organize what we see (and fail to see) and how we see it. The meani... See more

“I’ve often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us unless it’s inside a frame.” - Abbas Kiarostami

This means it’s really easy to get stuck. Stuck in your current way of seeing and thinking about things. Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it diffi... See more

We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no obvious purpose. Think of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” or what Joan Didion called “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We make this chaos workable, as Didio... See more