Stories of our Lives
Do you fancy yourself a storyteller?
Meaning-creating and storytelling are beautiful and powerful creative tools. Stories are not only told around the campfire or in children's bedrooms at bedtime. We are telling stories all the time. We create narratives when we decide on a curriculum for a school, write a speech, give an explanation for our decisions and when we fight and make up with our partners, friends or family.
These stories might not always have a neat beginning, middle and end, like in the Disney movies, but they are narratives nonetheless, with heroes and villains, suspense and drama. There are things to be understood between the lines and lessons to be learned. There is loss and celebration.
We are creators of meaning. Storytellers by nature. We create stories and meaning and then we play the roles we have cast ourselves and others in. Stories form a kind of algorithm for our lives.
If we have storytelling relegated to campfires, bedrooms and maybe marketing, the question is what we think we are doing the rest of the time - when we create meaning, but don’t realise we are busy doing so.
The algorithm is still running. The show is still on. But we’re often writing it blindly or just running the same algorithm over and over again. And we wonder why we are acting in a show we don’t want to be in. We waste the creative tool that storytelling is because we don’t own our inherent meaning-making power in every moment.
What do we want the script to be?
We are writing it.
In. Every. Moment.
Oh and let's not confuse that with us running the show. We do not.
On the overarching plot, we don’t get to decide.
But, we get to participate.
What stories have you told today?