A Good Story

“You can play the game, you can act your part – I know it isn’t easy to do.” James Taylor

“Who is playing out this drama? Who decides if it is a comedy or a tragedy?” Carlos Lopez

“It’s not just something I made up – It’s something I know. It’s something I read.” (Overheard in passing, as I was thinking about this piece)

My mom, when she heard somebody acknowledge that they weren’t really sure that they were remembering something accurately, liked to say, “Well, it makes a good story, anyway.” And it was clear that she considered a “good story” to be every bit as important as the literal truth – maybe even more so. (This may have partially been the Irish in her.)

What makes a good story? Is it drama? A happy ending? Good laughs?

What is the punch line of the story, the final act, the curtain coming down?

It’s clear that there are stories within stories – including shorter, self-contained segments within our life stories. Some stories chronicle many generations – and show the linkages among several successive life stories. Or a really good storyteller (novelist, film-maker, even sometimes a historian or biographer) can weave together many stories simultaneously – even those that are geographically, demographically and/or socioeconomically very separate.

So who decides what chunk of a person’s life makes up a separate story? Who sees the linkages among two or more life stories? Whether the decider or seer is a protagonist in the story or an outside storyteller, it’s clear that there is lots of room for subjectivity in creating most any story.

So it’s subjective – so what? What’s the difference? Maybe lots.

If I tell myself a story in which I am a victim, I may succumb to helplessness – or fight back. These situations can lead to paranoia – and/or domestic tragedies. (A few days ago in our area, a jealous husband killed the 18-year-old student with whom his 30-year-old wife/teacher was sleeping. This husband, as contrasted to the ever more common legal action against teachers, picked the kid as the villain in this story.)

So who/what/how determines a “true story”?

• The guy I quoted at the beginning of this piece believes that the story must be true because he read it somewhere. Others might put faith in what they hear on the TV or radio news.
  
• Most of us tend to pick and choose our sources – some will give more credence to the New York Times, others to Fox TV.
  
• Most of us tend to believe the stories we tell ourselves.

I really like a bumper sticker I’ve been seeing around town that says, “You don’t have to believe everything you think.” For me this gets to the heart of the story I am creating now as I write this. In the story I’m telling myself, right here and now (though I have thought these same thoughts many times in the past), there is tremendous subjectivity in the stories we tell, see, believe – even in the ones we tell about ourselves about our own lives. Maybe these especially.

So what? What if we concede this subjectivity in our own stories about ourselves? And not everybody will concede this about his or her own story. This area, the stories we tell ourselves – and sometimes others – about our own lives, are often the stories we will most resolutely defend.

In another post, I quote Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen master, as encouraging people to ask themselves, “Am I sure?” That previous post refers to which perceptions are accurate in the here and now. But the same principle can be applied to our stories. Am I sure about the veracity of this story?

As I described in that piece about here-and-now accuracy, holding on to certainty about our stories tends to create tension and rigidity. We fight to defend our version of the story. This can lead to shooting 18 year old kids, or even to full-scale wars.

But what is the advantage of staying looser with our stories?

• We make ourselves less defensive, less tense – more open.
  
• We need less distance from others. We don’t compete for whose story is more accurate, but see a bigger story that contains all these sub-stories. It then becomes not my story vs. your story, but “our story”, which contains all our various versions of the truth.
  
• If we accept that we are always, at every moment, making up stories – which may hold some specific accuracies, but never manage to include all important elements of the truth, including the stories of the other characters in our story – this gives us a lot of room to get more creative with the stories we tell.

A story that I am telling myself these days is that any time I make myself the hero of my story (or any of my sub-stories) – or even make myself causal, even the protagonist – I am missing the boat. If I were to trace the antecedents of this story fully enough, I would find that my current behavior has been shaped by so many previous scenarios, so many other people, that it is in no way separate at all – I am in no way separate at all.

Some would say that this perspective is limiting, that it keeps us from being proactive, from acting heroically. I would say that when we are telling ourselves a story in which we are the hero, it is just as subjective as when we tell a story where we are the victim.

It seems to me that the only even-close-to-accurate story is the story of the human race, imbedded in the much bigger story of the planet earth, within the even bigger story of the universe. I tend to call this big, big story, “life”. We sit within a bigger context – life. We are not truly causal, but life is. Or maybe (and I am definitely leaning more and more this way), causal stories are just one genre of story. Maybe the whole notion of one thing causing another is simply one way of looking at things.

Yeah, the story I’m most liking these days is one where nothing is separate from anything else, which leaves no “things” - and no “thing” to cause any other thing. Some quantum physicists these days are telling similar stories, but they may be equally locked into the particular lens they are looking through. I am seeing quantum physics and mechanistic physics as not in competition with each other, but as part of a still larger story – in which neither camp is “right” or “wrong”.

Because “right and wrong” is just one more kind of story.