Understanding the concept of what it means to have a “story” and what it means to be without this story is an awareness that all alone can change a person’s perspective.
I love a good story! I like happy endings! I listen with baited-breath to a story with suspense, failure, success, laughing, crying….It’s fabulous!
The difference between having a story and not having one may seem too strange and frightening to imagine. If I really question all the facts, if I really ask myself what is true and what isn’t true….what if I am Nothing? What if I really know nothing absolutely?
So many stories pile up over time. We fall into a certain demographic category: I am tall, blue-eyed, light skin, dual British and US citizen, 2 kids, divorced, engaged to be married mid-life, blah blah blah. Not that any of it is boring really….but it is the story of someone on the planet, unique but not so unique. Mediocre. Middle of the curve. Nothing special. Regular human.
Then we have stories that are our personalities, how we respond to things, how we tend to behave. I am introverted, shy, VERY funny, dry sense of humor, playful, analytical, dramatic.
People love taking tests around these kinds of tendencies: the enneagram, the Myers-Briggs, the Five Factor. It’s fun to categorize the stories, and people have found it helpful for creating intimacy as people talk about how they react to life.
And, we could question every answer, every story.
Then there are life-event stories. The things that happened to us along the way. Our parents, our bosses, our teachers. Big changes…”good” ones, “bad” ones.
How did we learn it all? It’s like we enter the planet, as infants, and then something happens with consciousness expanding. Memory. Emotions. We enter the Soup of This Story of Planet Earth and Me. And often its the story of a being a victim of something…whether it’s a parent, a natural disaster, a disease, mean nasty people.
I love this quote by Dave Barry “I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories.
Ha ha!
Here come the stories as they begin during first memories:
- Mom is crying and it means that I need to help her
- Aunt is bitter and has a mean face and it means she’ll hurt me
- He died and now all the grown ups are desperate
- Dad shouts to be quiet and I made the noise, I upset him
- Sister gives me the evil eye and it terrifies me that she doesn’t love me
- Grandma claps when I dance and I start trying to dance better
- Grandpa tells me he is proud of me and now I know I should want his pride
- There is something wrong with me
- I am too needy
- I can get hurt
It seems like life becomes a long, long story of one thing happening after another.
The Work is so simple, and by asking the four simple questions, it makes the notion of having a really good story that explains everything very doubtful.
“Life is simple. Everything happens for you, not to you. Everything happens at exactly the right moment, neither too soon nor too late. You don’t have to like it… it’s just easier if you do.” ~Byron Katie
Can you think what it would be like, right now just for today, if you didn’t have the thought that something happened TO you, but instead that it happened FOR you?
What is an advantage of that thing happening that you thought happened to you? This is not saying “oh fabulous, I can’t wait until someone close to me dies again”. That might be a little over the top.
But it is saying “I’m open”. Maybe I don’t know the end of the story yet. Maybe it’s not 100% true that this has been ALL terrible. I’m open. I can find good things that came from it. Maybe I can relax and enjoy the ride, in the midst of it all.
“As soon as the mind pulls out an agenda and decides what needs to change, that’s unreality. Life doesn’t need to decide who’s right and who’s wrong. Life doesn’t need to know the “right” way to go because it’s going there anyway.” ~Adyashanti
With love, Grace