Tell a Story Everyday, Listen to a Story Everyday
That time Irish wisdom wandered into the sex shop
So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.
Gensis 2:20
When was the last time you told a story? I believe with my whole heart that we need to tell a story and hear a story every day. Not an Insta post, not a facebook post. A person. Someone. Somehow. Via Zoom or on the phone or in person. But a human interaction. Books, movies, series—lovely, wonderful, yet— just once a day, hear a story and tell one. “Hear a story and tell a story every day,” said a friend in Ireland when I told him about Story Shepherds. He told me his grandfather always said it. And there, by the way, was a story. One person telling another person that something happened, as Dr. Rita Charon MD PhD describes. I believe she was quoting someone, and I’ve no clue whom. Simple. Plain. And yet we so seldom do it. Talking isn’t storytelling. Bitching isn’t storytelling. Ranting, no. So quickly have my many conversations wherein people want to get me all complicated by telling me the difference between a story and a narrative. Herein lies our problem. We even abstract storytelling, the opposite of abstraction. Our imaginations are instruments of poiesis. They are the borderland where three realities meet, the interior and the exterior, and then the one that holds all. If we use only one means of perceiving (five senses), we can learn about the world and think it is finite and difficult. If we use two means of percieving (five senses and imagination/memory/intution) we can experience the world as, to borrow from Thich Nhat Hahn, bittersweet and beautiful and infinite. All it takes is, like Adam in Genesis, go around connecting words from within to things without.
I learned today from my tax man that Steve Jobs created Pixar because he knew we were all getting in line way too early for the latest Macbook/watch/phone/etc and ran a risk of losing storytelling. Now, I know Steve doesn’t leap to mind as the savior of the human soul; however, he had a hunch he may have, along with Gates who actually does do savior-like activities but nonetheless contributed to the exclusion of the human soul from everyday life. Hence, Pixar. While some billionaires offset carbon, Jobs offset soullessness.
Story is soul. It’s that important. It’s how we see the otherwise invisible, inaudible, untouchable essence that binds us as one. Without it, we are separated forever, like Poole drifting off into space in 2001, ejected by Hal. IBM, one letter early. Tech. Listen to someone tell a story, and you see how many points of connection we share. In my creative writing classes I used to make up an order for reading work aloud. I don’t anymore. I just say “If you have an element in your story that this writer does—” two or three student start talking at once sometimes. I used to think I was imagining it, but I wasn’t. By mid-semester, we’re all writing about Nebraska at some point, and we would not know if we all didn’t get to share our stories. How much else are we missing by talking in abstraction and analysis? Are we so brainy that we can’t allow for ambiguity and nuance, particularly in regard to a form of expression that creates room in us for these very things? Room we need. We need some place to recharge and reflect where we can wander physically or mentally. How else will we hear the earth?
Theory of Mind data supports the Nebraska phenomenon. In those studies, people draw cards with images of cats, dogs, sailboats, pencil, and other everyday items from a deck and do not show it to the person sitting across from them blindfolded. Before reading literature (sorry, not trade fiction and sorry again for calling it that), the blindfolded person guesses wildly what the card it. After reading literature, they get it on first guest. I know. Lots of studies. Lots of data. Nebraska. I have not seen any studies regarding oral storytelling in this context. I have seen articles documenting how listening to a story or telling a story lowers bloodpressure, reduces pain report on pain scale by at least two digits of ten, resolves trauma, alleviates symptoms of depression, and lessens side-effects of chemo. I know people whose untold stories drove them to attempt suicide whose telling of these same stories saved them. Adding “and in the darkness bind them” to the health benefits of storytelling is not a stretch. I can’t think of any greater well-being than not killing each other over our 2% differences rather than enjoying our 98% similarities. Over time and many stories, as Theory of Mind would have it, even those 2% difference either dissipate or enjoy so much reflection that even what we thought was difference wasn’t after all. Silly us. We only needed to listen. We only needed to tell.
Similarities aren’t the only cords weaving us. There’s more to story than discovering things about each other. There doesn’t have to be, but there is so much more. Something occurs in us when we are listening to a story. We are participating in creation. Our level of listening can shape the level of telling. We take form for words to pour into. If we are calm and attentive, more words pour than if we are looking at our phones and antsy. Story teaches us many things through just this phenomenom: to slow down and breathe when someone is speaking; to open up to someone; to quiet our brain’s running commentary; and to read the world.
In the beginning was the word. Is that not the best opener ever in the history of stories, which is the history of humanity? Right from the start, we have a use of words that paradoxically undermines the power of the declarative sentence. Everything is declarative and clear right up until that last syllable. What word? I’m not going to come right out and say that word is story, but I might point out that all of what follows are stories and that in Revelations of the Christian Bible the number of the beast is a number and not a word. Which are we leading with now? How’s that working out? We’ve got two neural networks, one that connects seemingly disparate entities and one that differentiates between them. Both of these would be good to exercise. And yet.
But there’s more. When we read the world and our lives in it as a story, we practice poiesis. Reading the world as story awakens a different kind of noticing. It gets us behind the mask of surface reality, from skin to skin to mind to mind or heart to heart, either way: the interior. Experience of our own interiority deepens when we honor and name the interior of all around us. Imagine you are painting what you see. Create the story in your mind of this painting. You might get a kick out of quietly in your mind having a bit of a chat with the trees you see, or tell a story about the groundhog. When the person working the cast register at the gas station is chatting with a coworker, notice how they smile, their voice, their gestures. Watch the world unfold around you, and you soon unfold as well. Whatever it is, connect in your mind with what you are describing. Build this “naming” circuit’s strength until it is the default for you, allowing the parasympathetic soothings of story to quiet and still the sympathetic fight-flight-fawn that usually holds us in its talons.
Stories engage both sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Jack is up the beanstalk being chased by the giant: sympathetic. Jack seizes the golden goose and hurries back down to ground then cuts the stalk, causing the giant to remain up in his cloud house. (I’m sure he probably falls to his death, but I’m not looking it up.) Horror movies do the same in more heightened ways. Romantic comedies, buddy films, road trip stories, disaster films—they all have this unwritten code to provide some kind of suspense and some kind of release at the level of action (Action hero gets the stuffed animal to his kid on Christmas/birthday after saving world) or the level of story (Luke finds out Darth Vader is his dad only moments before [redacted] which isn’t a happy ending but a great one anyway). Why can lose ourselves for hours and hours watching Breaking Bad (all of it again)? The story is giving our central nervous systems a workout that we need to re-center ourselves for the next round of reality where the structure of our engagement is similar but played out over a less obvious series of events, but it’s playing out. If we’re looking, we see the story in everything.
Some examples from a few of my errands that turned into adventures:
At the trough of various kinds of cheeses at the grocery the other day, this other customer and I kept playing a sort of leapfrog as we both picked up the individually wrapped cheese for a lot longer than normal, neither of us saying more than “hmm cheddar” and “excuse me.”
There’s a sex shop up the road from me. It has this beautiful mural painted on its exterior, and I was curious so went in one afternoon. There’s a little window right inside the door where a polite young man checks I.D. then buzzes you in. I perused (and learned a lot) and felt the pressure and obligation to should purchase something. I selected a [redacted] then joined the line of six people in front of me. I hadn’t noticed it was so long, and if I had I would have given myself license to just leave. But there I was now. In line at the sex shop with six other people and the polite young man doing his best to keep things moving. On the television screen above the cashier desk a pornographic “movie” played. To my understanding it was filmed by a man lying back on the torn vinyl seat of what was possibly a muscle car but just as possibly a borrowed Pontiac Bonneville. A young woman whose face we don’t see was on top of him. You get the idea.
While pondering the kind of car this sex is occurring in, I remembered driving my grandfather’s Pontiac Bonneville from Sarasota to Winter Park near Orland for college. The car either hydroplaned or blew a tire on this drive. I then thought about how I lived in the car for a few months during my parents’ divorce between the time my dad “cut me off” and the time my mom started signing his name on the checks as he proceeded to derail for two decades then regret for the remaining decade after that. The other people in line ahead of me all watched the sex on the screen as well, each of us from an entirely different walk of Asheville life from each other, all of us brought together here, for this insanely grainy and frankly dull little window into these two people’s lives. But, face it, in the sex shop while standing in line with strangers what else are you going to do? (This was before Smart phones took away our empty moments during which so much of the good stuff happens.)
Stories are unfolding everywhere all the time. Inescapable. The question is, are you seeing them? Are you catching them as they glint past because we are so caught up in our own thoughts, our own stress that we let them rob us of life’s always-on-offer off-ramp into playful imagination? Are we choosing to stay in the sympathetic nervous system of stress and impatience because we have forgotten the parasympathetic land of calm and laughter? Time passes regardless of what we’re doing with it. There are no points for being dull and lost to wonder. It’s better to lose ourselves in wonder at the madness and insanity, because that thin end of wonder’s wedge is the start of the opening to the world that dwells beyond it all.
Engaging our perception in story trains us to perceive the world as both its surface appearance and its more subtle symbolic content, as information and inspiration. If we only see information, we lose the richness, the sensuality, the humor and the wonder of the real. It is always going on with very little variation. There’s always something beautiful, kind, or humorous. There’s always something frightening, unkind, or stressful. When we approach these as elements of a story, the good appears to us more frequently, and the bad strikes us less harshly. Both are always at play. That’s the important thing to remember. It is so easy to get locked down in the harsh. If you can remember, though, to do so, it is so easy to get a little smile from even the worst part. Yes, we have to train ourselves to perceive through this bicameral lens, but doing so makes life balanced and amusing. Is this escapism? You bet. Does it do any harm? Not at all. Can it breathe new life into life? Absolutely.
Reality and Imagination are not opposites. They are an interwoven experience co-emerging at all times. These experienced together transcend duality. We can be in the very sober meeting wearing a suit, and we can be watching the light change over the city out the window and remembering the light over another city where we once walked into the bookshop and met someone who made us smile. And if the one in charge of the meeting asks you, “Something funny, Laura?” Well, that’s just another story to tell someone later.
The world is both worlds interwoven, the stuff of life, and the stuff of Life. We just all pretend we’re content with living in just the first, even though the second helps us live longer and more happily. It begins so simply. Just start naming it all, and never stop. You’ll see the tapestry very soon. The world is written, and it spells out an invitation to you to play. Will you accept?