"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." - Robert Frost

How do you make a story out of a life?

Imagine a random sequence of numbers: [3,4,-2,50,23,-2,3]. We'll assume that each of them is an event in a life, either positive or negative.

The story we tell, the meaning of that story, it depends on what chunk of that sequence we choose to look at. If I just clip out [3,4,-2,50], that's a good solid action movie. Start low, slowly get better, have a setback, then triumph gloriously. If I clip out [50,23,-2], it's a tragedy, a story about a giant brought low. If I just expand that to [50,23,-2,3], then all of a sudden, that story has a poignant glimmer of hope at the end.

Leftover Soup is over. We have been treated to a clip of its characters' lives. But, of course, if you zoom out, you'd see Jamie's childhood at one end and his death at the other. Zoom out further, you'd see generations of his ancestors, and this might turn into the saga of the Halligan clan. Zoom in tighter, and it's just a story of one man meeting another in a hospital and offering to teach him how to cook.

I like to envision my own life in fictional terms sometimes. Depending on how it's cut and contextualized, you could make a tragedy, a comedy, a romance, or even a porno. Presumably, your life is the same.

But to the characters in that life, there is no "The End". Life just... goes on.