Stories

There’s a lot of words out there… and we need words, to tell stories.

As adults, we leave childish things behind us, including stories; so our words sometimes become merely instructional, explanatory, rational, adrift from the fulness of life…

Sure, we use words for lots of reasons – liberating, nurturing, or terrifying reasons – but words have only one purpose that is truly sacred: to tell stories, fictional or true. We need words to tell stories, so we can understand each other, and connect with each other.

Connecting is not the same as colliding or huddling. Human beings collide with each other in all sorts of ways: for good or bad, we try to control other people, or teach them what we think is right and wrong; or we huddle together with some particular humans and in so doing, exclude others; or we avoid colliding with people at all costs, because they’re making us miserable, perhaps, or because we’re trying to stand on our own two feet without other humans interfering.

But when we tell a good story to someone else, we don’t do any of those things – instead, we connect. A story enables the listener to relate to the story’s characters – no more, no less; we connect to them. Not-so-good stories have their meaning as a wolf in sheep’s clothing – the story is a mere disguise, a handy framework for a moral, and the plot and the characters are by themselves meaningless. But a really good story isn’t pushy or preachy: it just IS. When someone tells a tale, we lean in to hear more, knowing it’s just a story – it doesn’t matter if it’s true, or serious, or daft, or totally made-up out of the untidy attic of their mind… because there’s something inside us all that needs to listen, be drawn in, understand, connect.

And stories are still out there, hiding, in social media, EastEnders, jokes, fairytales, dreams…

When we hear or read a story, we bring our own experiences and emotional responses into it. We feel WITH the characters – laugh and cry with them; we hold our breath as the hero faces jeopardy and peril. This is catharsis. As we fall into a story and forget our social conditioning for a while, a little side-door is quietly opened in our mind, and our feelings are welcomed out and allowed to run wild. And when that happens, WE feel heard by the storyteller, even though we haven’t said a word. A good story, in effect, listens to its listener. Anything we learn from a story is a bonus, and happens within us, not to us.

As for the storyteller herself, two things can happen. She might, firstly, get that wonderful feeling when you know people are attentive to your every word; she will feel her listeners connecting with her story – there will be a sense of unity, of storyteller and listeners together. But at other times, she may find herself stepping back from her narrative, as the story takes on a life of its own; she is able to see the story from the outside, and greet it warmly as a welcome stranger… and she can connect with her own experience in a way she’d never known before. (And incidentally, another word for this is ‘therapy’.)

In a grown-up world, stories are a slice of pointless nonsense. That’s why we need ’em.