A friend and esteemed colleague once said that everyone’s life deserves a novel.

I think I understand what he meant. You can’t sit and listen to one person after another tell you their life stories without coming away feeling humbled by the magnitude of what we are as human beings.

While there are common problems, common patterns, and familiar behaviour, each person is unique. While there are very self-defeating and destructive things that people do, there are also some heroic and courageous adjustments that people make in the face of difficult challenges. Quite often I see these mixed together in the same individual. These people stir compassion and admiration.

When I was in my senior year of high school, Bob Dylan was still strumming an acoustic guitar and singing folk songs. He was putting his unique lyric to the talking blues, and there was a coffee house we used to go to in the attic of a local church.

One of the people who came there to perform was this guy with one hand missing. He picked the guitar with the stub that ended just above where his wrist would have been, and he was fantastic. He’d play Dylan songs, the Beatles stuff, and one day he came in and announced that he had been teaching himself to play the piano. He took us into the next room with a black stand up, and he started plunking out a tune. With one good hand and a stub he was really making it happen.

While I was waiting for my licence to practice psychology in Oregon, I worked for a period providing direct service to a 77-year-old man who had cerebral palsy. He had little control over his muscles, and so he could not speak intelligibly. He could not walk. When he was a child, people thought he was retarded and housed him in a home for retarded children. By the time he was an adult, he had learned not to trust mental health institutions.

By the time I met him, he owned his own home and employed a staff to take care of him.

He had a daily schedule that included watching daytime television, and drinking enough alcohol at night to knock him out. In fact, he was killing himself with it.

Nevertheless, he was fiercely independent and claimed that at 77, what was the difference?!

In order to pass the time, and to entertain and preoccupy him, I began to carry on a running stand-up comedy routine, and he liked me because I made him laugh.

People adjust to what one psychologist called the “press” of life situations. These do not necessarily even have to be all that negative.

Stress comes in two categories: bad stress that is very troubling and good stress that can be very exciting. Either way, people have to assimilate what is going on around them, the social and environmental contexts in which they find themselves. In order to do that, most of the time it requires an adjustment of some sort, and sometimes it pulls for whatever creativity we might have in order to make that adjustment.

Sometimes these creative adjustments are conceived in the “front” of a person’s head, but at other times they form in the back, somewhere out of awareness.

Either way, they serve to ameliorate the situation in which a person finds him or herself.

They do not necessarily have to be positive and helpful to anyone else, for the essence of a creative adjustment is that they, in some way, affect the press of life for the individual him or herself — not for the social group, family, or even marriage to which such an individual belongs.

The creative adjustment, in this way, is entirely self-serving.

Does that make it morally indefensible? Does that make it pop-psychology? Does that render it unacceptable?

It may make creative adjustments all those, and more, but none of those alter the fact that people make such adjustments all the time. They take into consideration all matters having effect for them, and they shift, change and modify.

The adjustment might be that they assimilate the stressful situation and grow in their capacities.

They might begin to self medicate through substances or stress-relieving behaviours. They might escape. They might change the way they relate to others.

They might turn to God. As the process of their creative adjusting takes place, every person develops the plot for the novel of their life.