letitgo.ca

The story of my life is pulled on over my shoulders and arms and legs and zipped up and buttoned up and hatted and shoed every morning. My character is given a name at the beginning and a eulogy at the end of a four act play. Cultural and societal norms call out stage directions on the fly. There is a sport announcer calling a play by play in my head when there is a lot of action. When things are quieter he is replaced by a nasal British voice droning a narration of every action or thought of a long tedious never ending novel that seems to be about nothing. At the end of the day I pick up the pieces of movie film off the editing room floor and spice it together into a comedy, a tragedy, an heroic odyssey or a farce depending on my mood which depends on how well I digested my dinner or my interpretation of my partner’s facial expression as we prepare for bed. A series of snapshots, edited with a theme of disappointment or gratitude, make an album called “my life”. A soap opera walks out the door with me in the morning, closer than my own shadow, says hello to the neighbor with me, gets on the subway with me, goes to work with me, goes to lunch with me, socializes at work with me (sometimes, briefly,  I speak naked, unclothed in story, when my story  goes to the bathroom or takes a nap). The story of my life comes home with me, turns out the stage lights, and closes the curtains on my day.

Modern Neuroscience tells us that our nervous system  monitors thousands of inputs every second, chooses seven, plus or minus two, and puts them together into stories that typically change every few seconds. The mind takes the constantly changing flow of experience which is so full of diversity and complexity, that  we can’t take it all into account, and it simplifies it into stories and perspectives. We make a decision about what is really important and use that as a filter to organize the flood of information, so that we can try to get a hold of things; to plan, to control, to understand.

Our works of art are an explicit framing of events. They say: “this is not the real world”;  “this is art”; “it is a selection, a frame, a beautiful limiting of infinity, which, when well done, points back to the infinite and inexpressible.”

Before there were theaters for stories and plays, the actors would just mark out a “magic circle” and step into it for the duration of the performance. When someone entered the circle it was understood that it was pretend. When they left the circle it was understood that pretend time is over.

Scientific method which has given us so much astounding progress and benefit uses story in it’s process

• observation of vast, complex, infinite elements

• develop a hypothesis, (a simplifying story), according to some organizing principle

• experiment to confirm or deny the hypothesis

In Greek mythology there is a story about the nature of stories. Poseidon’s son, Procrustes was an iron worker who had made an iron bed in which he invited every passer-by, on the road between Athens and Eleusis, to spend the night.  Then he would make them fit the bed. If they were too short, he would stretch them, if they were too long he would amputate as necessary. This story has some Greek justice, because in the end, Theseus came along and made Procrustes fit into his own bed.

Story telling’s whole genius is that it simplifies and selects. It reduces complexity. This is wonderful. It frees up our attention from the endless mundane details so we can focus on things that are more important, or of a higher order. It’s like how our habits free us from giving our full attention to repetitive actions, allowing us the ability to think about more important things. Story telling’s limitation is that it never tells the whole story, because it is a simplification. Simplification is stories’ resource and limitation at the same time.

Cause and effect is a good example of a simplified story we tend to take as being real. If you hit my car from behind while I am stopped at a traffic light then we say “you caused the accident.” and the law confirms this story as being true by making you pay for the damages. If we only look at the immediate cause and effect; you driving your car into mine and causing contact, this is true. But what caused you to run into my car? Maybe the brakes failed. What caused that? Let’s say the mechanic was distracted and didn’t install them properly. What caused that? His wife is really sick and he’s worried. What caused that? Bad diet. What caused that? TV commercials promoting unhealthy foods…. It just goes on and on. There are infinite causes to every effect, and every effect becomes a cause in an endless train of causes causing effects, effects becoming causes…. The immediate causes and effects are a limited story of what is happening, and we need to have a limited story in order to make our vehicle system work. We can’t be explaining everything going back to the big bang all the time. However there may be times that it would be helpful to open up to a larger, more nuanced picture. If we cultivate a mindset that knows there is always a larger context  we will be less rigid and more able to respond more fully.

If I am aware that there is usually a story operating, then I am not caught up and embroiled and embedded unconsciously in the story; the story doesn’t control me. I can consciously let go of believing that any given story is “real”. I can be lost in a story or I can consciously let go and see a bigger picture, directing my attention to that larger, more inclusive context. I can hold my stories lightly, to believe them no more than I would believe that a movie I saw was real, and use them to shine a light on a circumstance, and then, let them go, knowing there will always be more to the story.

I can let go of believing that a story is real, by noticing that even though the fire is projected on to the movie screen the screen doesn’t actually get hot; that the screen doesn’t change no matter what is being projected on it. Likewise our intelligence and awareness is bigger than any story passing through it. I can radically dis-embed from all story and be the larger context that is not a story; that absolute context; timeless, open, spacious presence and intelligence, which does not need a  story to be.

Letting go of believing my stories are real leaves me free to respond to situations with creativity and clarity rather than merely reacting with another story. When I let go of a story I can still use whatever insight or usefulness the story provided. I am just letting go of being embedded in the story. I am letting go of being a prisoner or a victim of a particular story. Holding on to my stories is like using a boat to cross a river and then to continue carrying the boat around on dry land for the next 5 years. I can let my stories go once they have delivered me to the other shore.

I can unbutton my personal heroic or tragic history, pull over my head the horse hair shirt of religious dogma, unstring the billowing open chested shirt of my romance novel, drop the chain mail and armor clanging on to the ground, which kept more pain in than it kept out, un-clasp  the ballroom  gown of my happy ending fairy stories, unzip my beliefs, peel off the underwear of my fantasies, un-shoe the foot so it can feel the ground and un-hat the head so it can see up.

I hoist my stories to my shoulder like a gun that I haven’t learned to aim; my stories reacting to your stories, which are reacting to our cultural myths; my ego stories reacting to your ego stories; my tragedy reacting to your fairy tale, trying, and trying, and trying, to find a place to stand on the ever shifting sands of the belief in my stories, instead of standing on the firm ground of knowing that I don’t know; of knowing that my stories are incomplete.

When asked why the oracle at Delphi proclaimed him to be the wisest of them all Socrates replied, “Because I know that I don’t know.”