I sit here with my coffee, watching the snow outside my den window softly falling. The usual street noises are muffled by the downy blanket settling on everything, and there’s a sense of time standing still this quiet February morning.
It is a good day to hunker down inside and pass the time. And what are our favourite ways to pass the time? Stories. We like to follow as the stories unfold on TV, in theatres, in books, on our computers. Sometimes, we even still tell our stories orally. All humans do this. It is our way.
I think this is something buried deep within our collective consciousness, maybe even our DNA, and I think it’s something we have done ever since we first formed sounds to represent what was outside of ourselves, symbols we could not convey with mere sign language.
You can probably imagine it: – over the millenia, early humans all over the planet figured out unique sounds to convey simple ideas that increasingly became more complex: ” eat, food, hunt, dead, cave, danger, fire, hunt that small one, bad food, good food, cave safe, stay together in cave…” And so it would have gone over time, words for survival morphing into words of guidance and teaching, passing on information to ensure the survival of the next generation. “Cooked meat is better for your stomach; you have to cover those nuts in a basket so the mice and squirrels can’t get them.”
When did we reach the point in our evolution where we sat around telling stories that were about more than just surviving? When did we begin telling stories about what the stars were, or where snow came from, or why we had to leave that place and find somewhere else to live? Without written records, we can never know when that began, our oral histories. But we can begin to see when the shamans recorded hunts on walls, when pictographs began to record voyages and battles. And as those early symbols for sounds of words appeared, now we had ways for our stories to live on beyond the lifespan of the story tellers themselves.
And we seemed to need to tell stories. Story telling went way beyond being a device for survival, becoming encouraging, thrilling, and even humorous: “Did you hear the one about the soldier who was patrolling the great wall and his horse threw him off and he landed right in the dirt in front of everyone?” “The great architect of the emperor was once a humble scribe, and this is the story of how he came to catch the emperor’s favour!” “There once was a lord who was cruel to his people, but then this happened and he became a changed man…”
We humans have so many stories to share. Whether we call them romances, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, whatever – they all come from a common well within all of us, a place where the history of our truths has deep roots. Where we try to make sense of who we are, where we’ve come from, the mistakes we’ve made, the dreams we’ve attained. The most improbable flights of fancy have something in them we want to share; a story we want to tell you – about something about us. And it’s our secret power. Ask yourself how it is that stories remain from a thousand years ago about a story teller who had to tell a different story every night for one thousand nights to stay alive…and ended up changing her country’s ruler.
There’s a saying from a new TV show bringing new stories about places far away and far in the future, that yet hold on to many familiar truths we all share: “it is the way”.
May we all keep telling our stories.
