Beginning a Story of One's Own

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July 25, 20266 min read

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© 2026 Koen van Gilst

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The life span of man running toward death would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new, a faculty which is inherent in action like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.1

I am traveling to the Alps with a friend for a hut-to-hut hike of several days. On the ICE to Munich we talk to a man who, during the Covid pandemic, looked back on his life as a director of TV commercials and decided he wanted to leave behind more than television ads. He started writing a children’s book and wrote a bestseller that can now be found in many classrooms for 10- to 12-year-olds in the Netherlands.

We spend several days hiking in the Dachstein Mountains, climbing the rocky, limestone summits, enjoying the idyllic alpine meadows and views over the valleys. It's good to be away from work, computer screens and AI. We've also brought a book to read and discuss while walking: Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. Written in 1958, but maybe even more relevant today than when it came out.

On our first day in the mountains we meet a young couple who have just come down from a via ferrata. Halfway through, they had been caught in a thunderstorm. For an hour they were stuck in thick fog and violent wind, unable to move forward or back. He had not seen the bad weather coming and had not realised how difficult the route would be. When we ask whether this had been good for their relationship, his girlfriend just smiles and says: “I’m about to push him off the cliff.”

Arendt distinguishes three human activities: labour, work and action. Labour is everything needed to keep life going. It is cyclical: what is done today has to be done again tomorrow. Think of eating and drinking, caring for ourselves and others, doing the dishes and brushing our teeth, but also earning the money we need to live.

Through work, humans make a lasting world of buildings, objects, works of art and books. This is man as a creating being, homo faber, leaving something behind in the world that outlives him.

The commercial director’s children’s book seems a good example. He has made something lasting that may remain in Dutch classrooms for many years. But perhaps the meaning of his story lies not only in what he made. The decisive moment came earlier, when he broke with the course his life had taken and started something without knowing where it would lead.

For Arendt, though, the most important human activity is action. We act among other people. By speaking and acting we show who we are and can begin something new. Because others act too, we never fully control what follows. We begin a story, but have no control over its consequences and where it ends.

You choose a mountain route and end up in a thunderstorm and an hour of existential terror. That hour becomes a story the young couple will probably tell many times, provided they have not pushed each other off the mountain first.

During our first attempt to climb the Grosser Donnerkogel we meet a Kosovar student. She has come alone from Vienna to see the Dachstein glacier. She is not impressed by the last glittering strip of ice just under the summit. “You should go to Albania,” she says. “That’s where the really wild mountains are.” Wearing simple trainers, she sprints up the mountain. It is already almost five o’clock, and the next day she has to be back in Vienna for work.