Day Twelve of your True Story: What's it All About?
On meaning and movement.
I went to seminary in 1998.
I was only enrolled a year before we moved from Texas to Vermont and I shifted course from seminary to grad school in education, but my word was it impacting.
I remember a few images and stories from the classes, but one image has firmly planted itself in my True Story: when one of my teachers, the late Reverend Will Spong, delivered a sermon at the piano. He plucked away at the keys weaving familiar musical themes with meditations on meaning and the potential power of litergy, when he was suddenly singing Burt Bacharach’s “Alfie”
What's it all about, Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live?
What's it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give
Or are we meant to be kind?This blew my mind. I didn’t fully appreciate or understand what was happening, but I knew I was at a nexis point in my life. I had just participated in a pillar of my True Story that I wouldn’t understand for decades. And now I can say that Will Spong knew that this question, “What’s it all about?” would be the primary motivation in my life. It led me to teaching, to storytelling and now teaching storytelling. I have found no better medium for figuring what its all about, than storytelling.
It was in seminary that I realized our search for meaning is ultimately about collecting and telling stories. We want to understand our lives, so we collect and tell the stories that seem true. We build a True Story, and for a moment, we feel like we understand what is happening and our place in the world.
My hope is that now, on this twelfth day of the True Story practice, you can see that your understanding of yourself and the world is comprised entirely of stories, and as storytellers, we have agency over those stories.
We can choose which ones will now comprise our True Story.
The lists we created on Days One through Six served a purpose of giving us an inventory, but you could make different lists that would work just as well. The goal was to disrupt and seek a beginners mind, rather than repeat the same old intentions and promises we make and disregard year after year. The exercise, though spiritual in nature, is not about “bettering your life", it is about seeing your life. Once you see your life, then you can decide what you want to do next.
So in answer to the question, “What’s it all about?” I can answer this: the meaning you seek is the meaning you create. You want to know your life’s purpose. You want to find love. You want to change your life so that you are more happy, fulfilled, abundant, serene or exciting. And now you know that “purpose”, “love” and “serene” are all stories. They are True Stories that you built and now live by.
And now you can choose to keep living those True Stories, or try on new ones.
You can try on “fun”. Fun is fun. You can try on “serious”. Serious is fun too. You can try on “baker” and “sexy” and “dependable”. All legit choices. You can also do “overwhelmed” and “resentful” and “poor”. Those are just as legit. Those are very powerful stories that affect you and those around you just as much as “happy”, “grateful” and “abundant”. They are all fine. They are all options. And you get to choose.
I can sense some resistance. Many of our stories are very difficult. We have some that are connected to grief and violence. Are you saying that a person’s experience of being attacked by a stranger is a story? No, I’m saying that our understanding and retelling of that experience of being attacked is a story. And again, this is not to say it isn’t real, it is to say that our story is what is True for us. It is not only a story about what happened but why it happened and what its affect has been on who we are.
The resistance might be connected to the idea that big experiences, either positive or negative, are somehow fixed. That they are written down in a cosmic book which can be referenced when we die or by a psychic or at least declared to be “what happened”.
Sure, if that’s your story. But it’s still a story, and all stories are options. There are countless bubbles over our head at any given time, and there is one in which the attacker must be punished, and another one in which the attacker will be forgiven. Both are options, both are equally True if chosen.
Therefore, you are in a position to choose.
My advice is to keep going. Keep telling. Keep working with your genre, your main character, your challenge and supporting cast as long as it works for you. When it stops working for you, choose a different genre or main character or stop doing the practice, but I hope you will continue to see that your understanding of the world is made of stories, and you have agency within that narrative construct.
You are making your world, one story at a time.
So keep going.
Tell yourself a story about purpose. About finding true love. About making money. About healing from chronic illness. About making friends.
Learn from your main character’s experience or your supporting cast. See how the True Story practice begins to bleed into every day life. You identify your own supporting characters. You see other main characters. You spot things happening in your “real” life that mimic what happened in your “made up” story. It becomes more conversational.
And then maybe animals start to talk to you, and you see fairies, and hear the wisdom of your ancestors and you can perform magic and have superpowers. Maybe?
Maybe.
In any case, I hope you stick around and continue to engage with me about storytelling and the what its all about. Here is my True Story by the way.
And remember to invite your friends into your understanding of the world. Share this first post with them and then wait twelve days. Its a lot of fun.