What’s the Story?

Tagged as: stories

He sang us his life sto­ries and we stopped to lis­ten.

Noth­ing could be more fun­da­men­tal to our men­tal fac­ul­ties than our innate abil­i­ty to tell and com­pre­hend sto­ries. They’re every­where: in movies, books, TV shows, news­pa­pers, and blogs. But even if we iso­late our­selves from these sources, heck even if we spend months in a cave, we can’t escape sto­ries.

It has been argued that our nat­ur­al instinct to per­ceive our lives as sto­ries star­ring our­selves is essen­tial to our san­i­ty and sur­vival. We see the world as a series of caus­es and effects, ifs and thens, and some maybes and what ifs thrown in to keep things inter­est­ing and unpre­dictable. For that pur­pose, some use sci­ence, log­ic, reli­gion, his­to­ry, or that elu­sive yet per­sis­tent notion we refer to as “com­mon sense.” Others avoid orga­nized forms of knowl­edge alto­geth­er and refer instead to an even more elu­sive “Self.” Others argue a com­plete absence of any sys­tem of knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence. Be that as it may, tell any one of these peo­ple a good joke and they will laugh.

We use sto­ries to syn­the­size mean­ing from essen­tial­ly indif­fer­ent and ran­dom occur­rences. The world presents itself to us unadorned, with­out a dra­mat­ic sound­track. Major life-alter­ing events could occur in the least expect­ed and most inap­pro­pri­ate places and at the most awk­ward and incon­ve­nient times.

On the flip side, how often have we tried to play film direc­tor or music con­duc­tor by set­ting a scene and orches­trat­ing every small detail only to find things veer from or even pro­ceed con­trary to our plans? Yet we still look back on it all and try to ben­e­fit from hind­sight to make some sort of sense of it all. And when we fail to do so, the psy­cho­log­i­cal con­se­quences run the gamut of uncom­fort­able to shat­ter­ing.

So when I’m asked why I like to design a house, or make a film, or take a pho­to­graph or keep a blog, I often give the short answer: “I’ve always dreamed of being (take your pick) an archi­tect / film­mak­er / pho­tog­ra­ph­er / writer.”

But what I’m real­ly think­ing is: Hey, I just want to tell sto­ries.