Timely Stories

When I was a boy, stories were my first and preferred means of communication. I told stories to my friends and family, and for a while I did not really understand how writing might be useful for something other than storytelling or making a list of Christmas presents I wanted. My relationship to storytelling was entirely intuitive, and as such my growth as a storyteller was no more noticeable to me than my body’s growth. It just happened. Which is why I am so grateful for the clients I work with now who are learning about storytelling as adults. It is as if I am being reacquainted with this essential art form. For instance, I did not understand until recently how stories require us to surrender to the artificial concept of time. Whether we perceive it or not, every one of us is always living in the Right Now. That’s when everything is happening. As such, everything that’s happening in the Right Now matters because it’s reality and reality is all that ever matters. Time, meanwhile, is nothing but a dream of the past and future, which by definition are never reality.

Have I lost you little? If so, this is why we have stories. The storyteller must ignore the reality of timelessness and say, “This happened and then that happened and then this and that happened, and then, finally, this really interesting and surprising and meaningful thing happened because of all the other things that happened before it.” In this way, the storyteller reduces reality to a few manageable bits, organizing these bits in such a way that life seems to make sense.

I suppose I was drawn to stories when I was a boy for this very reason. Kids live much more in the Right Now than adults. Play, a child’s most important pursuit, is very much a Right Now activity. But every child knows he will become an adult, and I could sense that something other than play would be required of me then. I was not really happy about this, but I could not stop what we called time, but was actually just change, which was just growth, which was just learning – and so I told stories to remember what I might forget if I got lost in what I learned.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group coaching.