Tell me a story!
It’s a child’s plea whispered or even demanded (so often at the twilight of bedtime). These stories might be ancient or hot off the presses or made up by parents on the spot. But it is undeniable that kids need to hear those tales, featuring the irresistible protagonist who is none other than themselves.
And the tale so often invokes an antagonist and antagonisms aplenty. There are conflicts conquered, with lessons and morals and life instructions toward “living happily ever after”. Now that’s a good story!
With children, we do not need to explain how the mechanism of storytelling puts them at the center of every plot. They just know! Perhaps that is because our brains are story-attracted brains from the start. Stories promote life lessons, socialization and the assimilation of values. Such a brain has evolutionary advantages for groups, individuals and their progeny.
Story-attracted brains actually think in stories; we become the story. From early on we think in narratives that consist of thoughts and images often propelled by emotion. We remember in stories and we plan in them too. These capacities are an advantage to survival, and maybe sometimes, our happiness.
The story-oriented mind can bring people together with common cause narrations and shared advantage for all. Good stories. Of course, some stories pull groups apart. And competing narratives can and do pit tribes against one another with spats and rumbles and wars. Within individuals, negative thoughts can unleash stories of war upon the self. These can degrade to self-contempt and self-destruction. Lesser outcomes might include a bad day, un-satisfactoriness and deflation. Those are the bad stories.
Perhaps one of the most insidious, if not altogether bad, functions of stories is to inflate a compensatory, false self: “me, Me, ME”. Sometimes called our “storyline”, these ubiquitous narratives address deflation with an armor of conceit or worse: an over zealous selfishness and sense of entitlement.
Such a problem has led some to consider the alternative of inner quiet and no story at all. We could drop our self-serving storylines and engage fully with life on life’s terms. No agenda. No scheming. The trouble is most find it hard if not impossible to go from bad stories to no story at all. Those bad stories seem to grip us…and if we are honest, many of us hold on tightly to them too.
How might we proceed?
While difficult at first, we could start attending to good stories that reduce narratives imbued with automatic negative thoughts, and rest in our blessings. We nudge forward stories that promote themes of loving kindness, compassion, generosity and serenity. With imperfect but consistent effort those personal narratives slowly change.
What else? We could unplug from compulsions with social media and be inspired by the myths, parables, koans and chronicles that highlight our basic goodness and wisdom. These perennial philosophies abound across time and space, so we should pause and listen.
While bad stories anchor us to egotisms within and between human beings, good stories seem to calm us, even liberate us. We could be delivered, moments at a time into the serenity of no story at all:
that wonderful pause and silence at the end of every outbreath.
Dr. Bob's Blog 