ALL my life I’ve dealt with words. I live in a world of stories, which are not replicable because our lives are unique and give us value and meaning. Yet, as each story is told, we also learn about what makes us similar, what connects us all, and what helps us transcend that isolation authors say separates us from others and ourselves and conquers loneliness, the hidden wound of our time.
Real stories take time as they take that sort of time called, pausing reflecting and wondering time. We listen to other people’s stories and try to remember that the real world is made of such stories and perhaps how life is teaching us to live.
In my work, I find that these are from the soul stories, where you find hope, wisdom to live a life worth remembering. Sometimes that meaning we may draw from someone’s story may be different from the meaning drawn from it, which does not matter because facts will bring us to knowledge, but stories lead us to wisdom. The capacity to understand and appreciate their gist.
Storytellers have the gift to be able to see beyond the veil of our beliefs, expectations and judgment of ourselves and others, so that we may see the world with wisdom.
Most of the stories we are told are written by novelists and screenwriters in the movies and are acted out by actors. These are stories that have clear beginnings and endings, but alas these are stories that are not real.
When we tell our stories to one another they have no beginning and ending, but front-row seats to real experiences. They may have happened in a different time or place and have a familiar tone because they are about us.
Real stories take time – the line to pause reflect and wonder – as life rushes along. With our stories and other people’s stories, they remind us that the real world is made for such stories. Stories are about the same thing — having and losing, pain and wounding, courage and hope, healing and loneliness and the end of loneliness.
Through the years, as we cobble our stories and realize that in telling them, we are telling each other the human story through narratives that touch us and are weaved about common humanness.
Sometimes during interviews, when I ask people to tell me their story, they tell me about their achievements, what they’ve acquired or built over are their achievements, what they’ve acquired or built over a lifetime.
Our open story is about who we are, not what we have done. It’s about what we are faced to build, not what we have built; what we’ve drawn open and rocked to do it is what we have felt, thought, feared and delivered through the events of our lives that which to us, alone.
When protests come up that it didn’t happen quite that way or it was more like this, all stories are equally genuine. It is about their experience of the event in their lives. They are not the events themselves, but they are just seen in our own unique ways with ourselves in it. Truth becomes highly subjective.
As a crime reporter for years, I’ve learned that stories can sometimes be full of bias and uniqueness mixing facts with meaning, many times the meaning we draw from someone’s story may be different from the stories they have drawn. It matters that facts bring us to knowledge but stories lead us to wisdom.
We carry with us every story we have ever heard, filed at some deep place in our memory. The best stories have many meanings that change us. Our capacity to understand and appreciate meanings grows. It required having a personal response to life.
The best stories have many meanings that change as our capacity to understand and appreciate meanings grow, requiring us to have a personal response to life. Is it possible to live life without experiencing it?
After 30 years of being a congenital unemployable in newspapering (to this day, I can’t write straight news) and 11 years of living with my own life-threatening illness, I, too, am a woman who is full of stories I have lived and have been told. These are my stories about being a daughter, a granddaughter, and an indomitable widow. There are stories of being a friend, a patient, a doctor’s companion, and an ace photographer’s devoted ally. There are stories about my friends, stories that are true and false and stories that I don’t understand.
Every one of those stories has helped me to live.
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E-mail Mylah at [email protected].
