The world's a stage

I saw this quote the other day and have my theories or opinions about it.

"All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed."

I'm a big believer in the value of story. As our kids were growing up, I read lots of stories aloud. I looked for biographies and 'stories of...' say mathematics or the english language or science, rather than simply getting facts from textbooks.

In fact, I believe in 'living books' and consider text books as dead. Someone else read all the bios and fun books and extracted out the dry facts for textbooks. And then they expected us to memorize all those facts for tests! I need a 'put place' to file facts in my memory, and facts are much easier to remember when clothed in story.

Looking back my kids didn't go through the typical rebellion most kids do. I think they did so much rehearsal for life by living in so many varieties of stories from all over the world and so many eras and cultures. They 'walked in' many shoes and felt the emotions of story characters dealing with varying life choices. (And too, we're very hospitable and did invite quite a variety of people over, sharing their stories, and some of the best learning can happen around the dining/kitchen table!)

So by the time they did leave the nest, I think the world's props and settings and characters weren't all that unfamiliar. They had in a sense 'rehearsed' for life.