A Story of A Story

The truth about stories is that’s all we are.

-Thomas King

There is a note in one of my journals.  It’s scribbled in blue ink at the top of one of the lined pages, without a date, but I know it’s about a year old.  It reads: ‘imagined stories.'  It refers to the narratives that we humans are so adept at creating in our minds about our identities and our social realities.  In particular, this note speaks to the stories that we create, perhaps around one off-hand comment a friend made one day.  Perhaps this comment made our minds spin, and, like great novelists, we built a story around this comment:  "this person thinks this about me, because of this reason," so on and so forth.  This story, now a reality at least in our minds (and how easily we convince ourselves that it is indeed the reality), then shapes our next interactions with that person.  Maybe we shy away from this person the next time we see them.  Maybe we don’t speak as much, fearful of what this person already ‘thinks’ about us.  Maybe we speak differently.  Maybe we approach this person with fear now, or contempt, or indifference.  Perhaps this interaction then shapes all the subsequent interactions we’ll have with this person. 

Our new reality is thus shaped by an imagined story.

We live and learn by our stories and in our stories.  Stories are the mental architecture for the choices we make on everything from our destinations abroad to whom we’ll befriend and how we’ll use our time.  Most of our stories are unconsciously held.  For the most part, we simply live the stories that have been planted in us by parents and peers, and by the powerful images of wealth, power, fun, and beauty that bombard us daily.  As ones with the capacity for mindful choice, we also plant stories in ourselves.  We construct assumptions and expectations that mark our lives and give certain meaning to our global learning, for better or for worse.

- Richard Slimbach

Slimbach, author of Becoming World Wise: A guide to global learning, takes the idea of the story a step further.  Not only do stories shape our interactions with each other, stories shape our perspectives of the world.  In the context of his book, Slimbach claims that the stories of our family, our culture and our nation shape our outlook on life, and thus to a high degree, our interactions with other cultures. 

As a program leader on a global gap year, this idea could not ring more true.  Daily, as we meet, live, and work with people spanning the continents, and as we discuss an issue so embedded in stories as is ‘development’, our students are confronted with the stories that have been planted in them for the past eighteen years.

Development is only a word.  Some of the words that come to define it: growth, change, progress.  These words hold no particular value, but our stories give them value.  Growth becomes economic.  Change becomes industrial.  Progress becomes modern.  As we bump up with people from different families, different cultures, and different nations, we begin to see that reality is only our reality; that our reality is only our perspective; that our perspective comes from our story. 

Now in Ecuador, our group of global students is studying issues related to our environment.  In one of our seminars, it was revealed that the mindset leading to the industrial patterns of production and consumption came from an era in which there were at least 5 billion less people.  Forests seemed endless.  Places seemed empty.  Resources, it seemed, would never run dry.

We now know that this is not true. 

Forests, it seems are not endless, and we can actually impact an ecosystem so much that forests may not grow back there.  Empty places, places for the taking, are actually inhabited by people all over the world.  These empty places are actually places where people collect food, building material, and medicine, and where people may live seasonally.  Resources, it seems, are running dry: we have severely depleted the oceans fisheries, one of our once boundless sources of ‘free’ protein; clean, fresh water is ever harder to come by; fertile, arable land has now become quite infertile.   

We now know that this, the idea that nature is a boundless, never-ending provider of all things we need, that we humans can not detrimentally impact this endless fountain, is not true.

And yet we continue to live as if it is.

Al Gore, in An Inconvenient Truth, forms two equations:

Old Habits + Old Technologies = Mostly Predictable Consequences

Old Habits + New Technologies =  ?

Our mindset was not only framed by what seemed like our environmental reality, it was framed in our spiritual and ethical, individual and collective conscience.  Manifest destiny gave North American settlers the internal motivations to conquer the ‘wild,’ and to civilize the ‘savages’. 

Daniel Quinn, in his book Ishmael, paints us a picture of two competing narratives, one of a culture of Takers, the other of a culture of Leavers.  An attempt perhaps to reveal to a modern and dominating culture the destructive environmental impact that our story is enacting on this planet, he tries to dig to the roots of our story in order to help us see what shapes our decisions as a culture of Takers:

Every story is based on a premise, is the working out of a premise…Your entire history with all its marvels and catastrophes, is a working out of this premise. The world was made for man.  If the world was made for us, then it belongs to us and we can do what we damn well please with it. 

In a small side story, Quinn has a jellyfish describe its story.  Creation and evolution, it just so happens, ends with the jellyfish. 

How would it change our everyday decisions if our story was such that we humans were not the pinnacle of creation?  That the plant and animal species that inhabit the many ecological niches in which we also live were our partners on this earth?  That we were to share this home with them?  That our environment, living and non-living, and the resources it provides, was not strictly to be used, but perhaps to be cared for and shared? 

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people.  Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world.  But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as your does, they will live at odds with the world.  Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will act like lords of the world.  And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will be bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.

   - Quinn, Ishmael

The truth is, most of us live unaware of our stories.  As Slimbach says, “Most of our stories are unconsciously held”.  We do what do, we buy what we buy, we live how we live, unaware of the story that shapes our every single decision. 

Is the world ‘bleeding to death at our feet’? 

If so, why?  What story do we live by that allows that?  

Who/What feeds us this story?

What can we do to change it?

To change the world requires that we change our consciousness, the stories we live by.  Look at the lives of people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Joan of Arc, or Helen Keller – those who lived from and for something that reached beyond themselves.  One quality seems to stand out above all:  a steadfast vision.  Despite opposition and personal limitations, they were able to firmly connect their personal interests to a future expectation of a more just and humane world…

Vision is an act of seeing, an imaginative perception of what should and could be.  It begins with dissatisfaction – even indignation – over the status quo, and it grows into an earnest quest for an alternative.  Global learning that serves the common good faces the world as it is and declares, ‘This is unacceptable – the despair, the dispossession, the exploitation, the contempt for human dignity – there must be another way.’  Then it dares to dream.  ‘Nothing much happens without a dream,’ declares Robert Greenleaf.  ‘And for something great to happen, there must be a great dream.  Behind every great achievement is a dreamer of great dreams’ (2002, p. 16).

   - Slimbach, Becoming World Wise

Everyday, I struggle to become aware of the stories that I create in my mind, based on my insecurities, about how people feel about me.  Everyday, I aim to become conscious of the stories that I weave, such that I may separate them from what has really happened, what is really happening, and approach people, and life, with more presence, more love, and less illusion.

I dream of authentic interactions with those around me, and I dream of authentic interactions with my home, this one Earth. 

What is your dream?