The story of stories (or why stories matter)

Human beings are story beings. As water is to fish, stories are to humans.

Stories take place inside our heads. This can be seen most simply with fiction books. We’re reading or listening to words, and those words create experiences inside us. The author puts the words together, but the actual experience of the story unfolds inside us. Each of us has a unique rendering of those words. Ours might be similar to another person’s, but it will never be exactly the same. Once we see this, it is not much of a leap to realise that the same is true of our moment to moment experience of our life—that it takes place within us. All of us live our lives within stories.