Recently, my son, who lives in Seattle, Washington, 'tagged' me on Facebook. I was then faced with the challenge of either ignoring my own son, or coming up with 25 random bits of information about me. So, I did it. I came up with a bunch of stuff, and it was not easy. This morning I see that my nephew, whom I have not conversed with since his father was killed in a freak automobile accident in Florida in 1996, has also tagged me. So I read through his 'bits of information' and I thought about my son's and my own, and I have a conclusion. Life is a series of bits strung together by the stories we tell one another. If we just take the bits and pull them back out of the stories, what does it look like?

This morning I sat in this cold house, and I twirled around in my swivel chair to put some socks on. Then I pushed off with one foot and twirled around again.

This time I just let my momentum slow by itself until I stopped, and I tried to catch that exact moment when movement turned into stillness.

I like to see if I can catch myself waking up. The other side of that is to catch yourself falling to sleep. I cannot do that latter, but I've had some success with the former.

When I am at a dinner party, I like to listen to other people, and so I don't say much. I wonder if the people think I don't like them or that I'm bored. Sometimes I am bored.

I have a copy of The Metaphysics and one also of De Anima.

I have three guitars and three amps, but I play mostly just one of each. My wife wanted to sell the other two, but I said 'no'. It feels like cutting off one of my arms to think of selling one of those amps or guitars. Would you do that? I can see the ad in the paper: "One left arm for sale; hand and fingers intact; 61 years young and still in good condition; does not come with case."

I joined the Navy when I was 18 to see the world; I never got on a ship. I never got out of the state. I was stationed about 90 miles away from my hometown, and I used to go home on weekends. So much for that.

When I was 10-years-old I read a biography of Ernest Hemingway and decided that I wanted to become a writer. That stuck.

One of the best physical sensations is to stretch; one of the best sensual perceptions is the smell of rain on dry earth in the central Sacramento valley.

I think my next CD will be Allison Kraus and Robert Plant's award winning recent contribution 'Raising Sand'.

In 1975 I was driving a Plymouth Duster with my wife in the front seat and two fellows fresh off the plane from Florida in the back seat. They were still wearing their short sleeved, palm-tree printed shirts when the breaks locked up going down a long steep, snow covered hill that looked more like a ski jump than a country road. We slammed into the three or four cars stopped at the bottom of that hill, and that woman has been afraid of snow on the road ever since.

Now, that last thing was a story (it's hard to keep from telling stories). It wove together several otherwise isolated bits of information, and it made a life meaning statement for at least one person. That is the kind of thing we do with the bit parts of our lives. We make wholes out of them.

In order for the mind to file them, to organise them, we weave them together into narratives, or stories that we can pull out and tell to ourselves or to others. In doing that, we also contextualise our lives.

Every time you tell a story about yourself or someone else in your life, you construct a meaning.

It is that process and that result-that meaning-that narrative therapists attempt to understand and help the client deconstruct.

The narrative therapist acts like an external, investigative reporter and asks questions, probing problems in order to get the client to examine them as if from the outside. Is there another way to tell any given story? Are all elements of the story essential? What if you start telling the story somewhere else, like sooner in one's flow of life? What was going on then? What if you change the ending and purposefully rewrite it to reframe it in a positive fashion? What if you adopt the perspective of another character and speak from that 'place' in the story? What if you change some of the words in the story, some of the adjectives and adverbs that modify and give colour to a basic narrative?

During a recent dramatic incident in New York, an airplane was landed in the Hudson River when both its engines were shut down by a bird strike. One way of telling that story is to tell it in the point of view of one of the flight attendants at the front of the plane, from the moment of the bird strike to the time when the plane landed.

Another, and quite different way of telling that story is to tell it from the point of view of a flight attendant in the back of the plane, and to start sooner, describing how this seasoned crew was on its final leg of a multi-day trip, but not to end until after the crew and the passengers were all reunited in North Carolina and the scope of what they had all been trough could be appreciated with more complexity. Those are two different stories.

When I read my son's 25 bits of information from Facebook it was quite a different experience from reading my nephew's list. That's because I know more of my son's story than I do my nephew's, but I hope to rectify that.