Each Christmas we gather to hear
the retelling of a story of a man from the Middle East who preached a radical
change in our collective story—from one of retribution to one of love: love
God; love your neighbor as yourself.
And yet our world still trembles under our habit of shaming and negative conclusions that
there is no way out for us, no hope: but there is a seachange in the wind.
Our stories are the sea charts by
which we navigate our lives—the spells by which we cast the very essence of our
life adventures—the substance from which they form. They determine whether we
stay in port, or venture out to sea, and largely, the courses that we will
explore—or not. Embedded in these story-charts are the values we will place on
the conditions, events and relationships we experience on our journeys. I have
known people who say they don’t like surprises, but I’ve always loved getting blown off course, getting lost—finding
myself arriving into a strange new land—in a part of the city I’ve never been
to before, through the door of a shop-front I’ve never been into before, in the
engineering section of the library checking out navigation systems. We mostly think
in terms of having a set of choices: ‘Yes; No; Maybe.’ To these three, I like
to add ‘What is it?’—an element of inquisitiveness—a stance of openness, that
isn’t yet conclusive; a space to grow into—feel into something new. While gambling
casinos have never held any interest for me (not a large enough percentage of
return) —getting blown off course, getting lost, always pays off in my book.
Yet, even in the rich nuances of
getting lost, checking out the local treasures and offerings, we are still under
the operating-system of our stories—through which all choices are
filtered—often guided by one-liner story abbreviations within the larger net of
our archetypal patterns. In the movie Into
the Woods, Johnny Depp’s Big Bad Wolf tells Little Red Riding Hood,: “The story you tell is the spell.”
Observing a young woman negotiating
sea-stacks, outcrops of rocks at the ocean’s edge, the question of will she leap across that
rushing froth of tide-water thrashing between the two rocks?—or will she climb
back down and go around? Whether she jumps across or goes around is contained
in an internalized descriptor in her story of what kind of person she thinks
she is; something like: “Always one to take a risk if she thinks she has half a
chance; it seems that Something is always there reaching out to help her;
helping her scramble to safety; to the prize.”—or, instead, “Ever cautious,
knowing far too many people count on her, she carefully back-traces the climb
of rock to the security of the sand and sought the way around.” These are
operating systems—spells with which we cast the quality of our life-experiences,
the events and our interpretations of them: Who We Are, Where We’re Going,
Why—and What We Can Be, are formed out of our stories.
The ‘What We Can Be’ is the opening
in our stories, the lu purtuni, the doorway, the opportunity to become more,
something different, than we have been. We often don’t know it, but our history
does not define who we are, but rather what we project out into the future from
referencing that history. But wonder if we can create a different future by
telling a different story?
I am astounded by how attached we
become to our stories, as much to the negative ones as well as the positive
ones, by how resistant we can become to changing our stories, avoiding like the
plague looking at any in-congruencies. We cling tenaciously to the old stories,
conflicting though they may be, cleaving to them like a broken mast in a
shipwreck, bedraggled in the sea, refusing to change our stories, even if they
are drowning us.
Depp’s Into the Woods line, “The story you tell is the spell,” is a seachange
in our collective consciousness that is happening now, we are opening to the
concept that our internalized stories about who we are, who we can be, the
under-the-breath comments we make to ourselves, the quick, one-liner, pronouncements that we make to
others—often unchecked statements, are nautical charts of the seas we sail, and how we will fare in those adventures. Ready for a seachange?
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