Stories
Stories rule the world.
ORANGE - Is The Color of Light
We humans tell and believe STORIES.
For instance, that’s how the indigenous people passed along practical, cultural, and whatever we mean by spiritual knowledge. Like the history of a flood 7,000 years ago.
Listening to stories is how I learned about my father surviving a plane crash off Tinian during World War II. The All-American, Basketball-Player pilot didn’t. Along with many others. Dad regained consciousness, underwater, in the dark, at night. That’s always haunted me.
Telling stories is also how we orient to our world: Science, Christianity, MAGA Trumpism, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Capitalism, Trickle-Down Economics.
We orient so tenaciously, we kill people in support of these stories. Or just let them die.
In the Mao or the MAGA examples, even people who believe our story.
The stories we tell bulldoze facts, consequences, rationality, reasonableness – any imaginable admirable virtue we humans might wish to embrace as guidance.
If our latter approaches or qualities challenge the prevailing story, they and we will too often be reviled. Apostates, blasphemers, heretics, seditionists. Perhaps deported or killed or shunned or imprisoned or blackballed or peripheralized in some way. Kicked out of college. Starved. Exposed to a disease for which we have no immunity in the supposed service of acquiring that immunity. Even if things don’t work that way.
In our devotion to our stories – as believers – we can operate with stunning cruelty. Self-righteously. With contemptuous assurance as to Truth (Capital T) revealed. Utterly lacking in empathic resonance. These are Others, you know. Not us. Not our kind.
Our stories can entertain, sooth us to sleep at bedtime, or kill the entire human population of earth.
Create unimaginable horror. So we won’t have to imagine it. We can watch it on our cell phone.
Stories, like guns or atomic weapons or words, provide very dangerous tools when placed in the wrong hands at the wrong moment.
They catalyze. They potentiate. They nudge us over the tipping point from which there is no return.
And, you know, they are just SOOO easy to invent. And to propagate. We enjoy going viral. So do our stories.
We could benefit from learning to be more careful.
But, in my story, we won’t.
Learning, in this context, would illustrate reflective wisdom. But that’s not the predominate conventional storyline. Lotta work required. It won’t sell.
I guess, instead, I’ll tell my Self a story different from those I’m currently hearing. Something about painting patterns that appeal to me, and about the clear-eyed noticing of whatever I can perceive and about writing a few words to articulate my reflections on all that.
And about sitting on my porch in the morning breeze while reading Eiren Caffall’s All the Water in the World. It’s about what we’re doing to ourselves, offered from the perspective of after we’ve done it. Strangely – or maybe not so strangely — tin he face of the mindless (or oblivious)optimism, comprising the current-day surround, I find this story quieting. Not comforting, certainly. Just quietingly resonant.
And, having written all this, I ’m thinking about walking down to the dock and going fishing — without any bait. That way I can cast into the lake without killing anything.
The soothing rhythm, I imagine, would offer something of peacefulness in the face of our collectively fostered, foolish, impending calamities.