Expanded Lives 23
Story 23 - Alfie the Cat

The Expanded Lives collection is emerging from another writing project:‘The Xpanded Family at Light-Mann Farm’.While developing the Light-Mann Farm series, I became increasingly interested in the possible consequences of Xpansion, the idea that we can extend human identity, experience and connection beyond their familiar boundaries. Eventually I found myself with a list of twenty benefits that such possibilities might bring, alongside twenty corresponding challenges.Those forty ideas became the foundation for a collection of forty stories within the Light-Mann world, which I titled 'Xpanded Lives’ …..but something unexpected happened while I was writing them. Again and again, I realised that the ideas themselves did not depend upon Xpansion at all.We already live with them.We learn in one part of life and carry what we have learnt into another. We remember the same events differently. We become close without becoming alike. We create things together that none of us could have created alone. Greater belonging brings greater responsibility. New possibilities can liberate us, but they can also become pressures,and each generation discovers assumptions that the previous generation could barely see.So I decided to take those same forty ideas out of the speculative world in which I had first explored them and look for them in ordinary life.The result is this series:Expanded Lives.The stories in this collection require no knowledge of Xpansion or the Light-Mann family. They are day to day stories about musicians and gardeners, children and grandparents, families and strangers, animals and communities. The connection remains, however.The stories in the Light-Mann series ask what these forty ideas might mean in a world transformed by Xpansion, whereas the stories in the Expanded Lives series ask where those same truths have been quietly present all along.