The stories that we tell ourselves, whether they be false or true, are always real. We act out of those stories, reacting to their realness. William James knew this when he observed: “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”
What storytellers do — and this includes journalists and everyone who has a point of view and an audience, whatever its size — is help shape our stories of how the world works; at their very best, they can empower our moral imagination to envision how the world could work better. In other words, they help us by cultivating the right balance of critical thinking and hope.
What we need, then, are writers like William Faulkner, who in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, asserted that the writer’s duty is “to help [people] endure by lifting [their] heart.” In contemporary commercial media, driven by private interest, this responsibility to work in the public interest and for the public good recedes into the background. And yet I continue to stand with E.B. White, who so memorably asserted that “writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life”; that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down.”
Yes, people sometimes do horrible things, and we can speculate about why they do them until we run out of words and sanity. But evil only prevails when we mistake it for the norm. There is so much goodness in the world — all we have to do is remind one another of it, show up for it, and refuse to leave.
Anyone who has spent any time around children know that they love to hear a story (if it’s a good one) over and over and over again. Research has found that children who are read the same story several times learn words quicker than those who hear a wider variety of stories with less repetition. In fact, children need to hear a word around 80 times before it becomes part of their vocabulary.
Some researchers also propose that children may choose the same story again because it’s familiar and comforting. Young children have very little control over their own lives and what happens around them and even to them. We all feel more comfortable when we have a little predictability. Young children especially cling to what’s familiar.
We grown ups like to think we’re so different, but not so much. We have favourite movies, favourite stories, favourite books and if they’re special to us, we can experience them again and again. And it’s because we might be at different places in our lives when we read it, and see and understand new things. Different themes appear to us. Different parts of the story relate to our own life experiences.
Learning to tell our stories is a life-long endeavor. Many of us learned to tell our own stories earlier in life but have to re-learn again because we realize that our story has grown, or evolved, or been re-written.
We lose someone or something in our life, and our story changes.
We make room for new people, new loves, new families, new journeys, and our story changes.
We have experiences that shape us – both great and terrible, and our story changes.
We have discoveries, revelations, and learn about ourselves as we age, and our story changes.
We discover new passions and interests, and our life changes directions and our story changes.
And through all of this, it’s like we have to figure it out again. The same way we described ourselves as the protagonist in our own drama doesn’t fit anymore and we have to write a new script…one that suits where we are, who we are.
You can never read or hear a story too many times…there will always be something new to hear, to see, to understand, to learn. And so too for us and the stories of our living. We can never underestimate the power of telling and re-telling our own stories. May the wisdom of sharing them, and hearing them, bring us to new places and new understandings.
-Chris New
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