Tell Better Stories

A few years back, I went for a hike in the mountains. I met a young man who was listening to death metal on a Bluetooth speaker as we were walking in a beautiful, pristine Alpine landscape. He looked like a biker kid: the boots, the metal on his face, tattoos. I asked if he could put on headphones and he said he didn’t have any, and in any case “he’d walk faster than me so it wasn’t going to be a problem”. He was obviously a city kid and couldn’t out walk me, so I was going to be stuck listening to him and his music all day. We came to a split in the road. The easier path went to the right (that’s what I’d been planning to do) and another route went to the left. The left route was marked with blue and white, and that means a bit more technical or harder or more exposed to rock fall or just plain falling.

His music was going to annoy me so I went left and let him go right, and accidentally had a fantastic, fun hike. There were some cables to hang onto and a ladder or two to climb up or down, but nothing extreme. It was a beautiful day, and I never would have gone there if the biker kid hadn’t been kind of a jerk. I had great time.

I realized that retelling stories is something that I do, sometimes consciously, sometimes without really being aware of it. I retell them to find something positive. I could tell this last story about how annoying the biker kid was, or how arrogant he was saying that he’d walk faster than me. All those thoughts were there, too, but that’s not the story I tell.

Stories are important, and they are real. Nearly everyone on the planet could draw a picture of a ghost or a zombie, but there have never been such things. They come from stories. They are real because we’ve made them real.

Money is just a story. It’s a piece of paper, or these days some numbers that are associated with our names, and the stories we’ve told about that piece of paper means that we can buy a coffee, or go on a trip, or see a doctor. Our stories have value, in a real sense, or at least in the sense that the story behind a piece of currency means that we can exchange it for something we need or would like to have.

What’s important are the stories you tell yourself, and the stories our societies tell about themselves.

We need to start telling ourselves better stories. That can often be the goal of some religions to help people accept the unacceptable (‘when God closes a door, he opens a window’, ‘things happen for a reason’ ‘I’m sure he/she is in a better place now’ ‘God never gives you more than you can handle’) but most of the people spouting that sort of stuff don’t go the extra mile. I’ve very, very rarely met someone who brings love and kindness out of their church and into the world. They mostly bring out a judgement of others and find everyone else wanting and while they themselves are blessed and perfect.

I think we can do better, and I think that believing in a god is not a pre-requisite and might even be an impediment to finding a way to be more content with our lives and being kinder to others. We can teach ourselves to try to understand others better, to have empathy, and to live through the problems life throws at us.

The question we need to ask ourselves isn’t ‘why’ because there probably isn’t a ‘why’. ‘Why them and not me’ and ‘why me and and not them’; it’s not important. Tell a different story. Ask different questions. ‘What happened and how am I able to take something positive from it?’ And then retell the story to yourself until you can find a kernel to turn it around. If we can all do that a little, we might just be a little bit more capable of getting along, accepting each other, and working together to make the world a little bit better instead of a little bit worse. It will also likely make us much happier.

So when something is making you unhappy, try reworking it, see if you can tell yourself a better story.