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.

There are at least two different kinds of stories in which we exist. There’s the chattering voice inside our head that narrates life to us (the one that’s easy to spot). Then there are the invisible stories, the ones we might also call culture or learned values. These ones are so obvious to us that we often don’t see them as stories at all yet we live our lives inside their reach. They dictate everything: how we spend our time; our hopes, dreams, and fears for the future; how, what, why, and who we educate; why we think we’re here; and so on. Often we aren’t aware of these stories, but they are always evident in the way we behave, through the choices we make, and the choices we see. Real change in our life happens when some aspect of this invisible story shifts. All of a sudden, something that made sense to us before no longer does and our behaviour changes to reflect that.

All stories, from those inside books to the ones in which we live, are of the creative ability of the universe. They all come from this power. It is the only thing that is ever true about any story. The creative ability itself is neutral. It is something we can do, a power we have been given, and one we’re using all the time whether or not we are aware of it. The practical difference in our lived experience comes when we understand that is what we’re doing, when we understand humans are story beings and that we are free to create and recreate our stories.