Stories

The Universe is bigger than us and hopelessly complex. Being creatures of small brains, we were given tools to help us simplify things. Our senses simplify things. They are not geared to seeing/hearing/smelling the way things really are (we don’t experience things at the atomic level let alone quantum level of reality. We see things several levels of magnitude removed from the building blocks level of reality and only within a very narrow spectrum of light. The worlds we hear and smell are much smaller than what our dogs experience). They only give us a rough approximation of some of the qualities of the things around us, enough to get us out of the way of buses hurtling towards us and enough to get all mushy when a dog lays its head on our lap.

Besides our senses screening out a lot of the noise we don’t need to pay attention to in order to survive, we were given the gift of storytelling to help with simplifying things. We were all born into the middle of an unfolding universe with untold eons of time of causes and effects preceding us and following our little bit of time here. But our stories carve out a bit of space-time and gives things convenient beginnings, middles, and ends that we can get our finite minds around. They simplify things into categories and building blocks that we can do something with. They help with filtering out the background noise so that a coherent sound can be heard.

Stories can be good. We need them. But we can get the story wrong. One can view depression and anxiety as diseases of our inner storyteller. The story has gotten stuck. There’s no longer a clear way forward. It's like we have blinders on, only letting us see the depressing or anxiety provoking parts of the world. This poem describes one of the experiences of this (and the hope of healing):

Tell me a story.

I find in my hopelessness the end of all narrative arcs.

I’ve burned my bridges, poisoned all the wells, written off all my friends.

Despair clings to me like a wet t-shirt and I’ve no strength left to peal it off.

Cold with self-hatred, I’m done.

Unless you can repair this story.

Find the narrative arc I missed.

The one where there is one more bridge, a way forward.

Tell me I’m not at the end.

Tell me there are chapters still to be written.

That is what I’m telling you. Many chapters. We can learn how to take the blinders off. There are "story repair" people out there. Let's find one.