What's the Story?

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I saw a film entitled, The Stories We Tell. It is a documentary about a real family in which various family members are interviewed by another family member (who is making this film) regarding a significant occurrence that took place in the the past. (No spoiler here....I won't say what it was...see the film!) The fascinating thing about it is that no two stories about the occurrence are the same. Each telling reveals more about the speaker than about the occurrence itself or the person being spoken about.

Fast-forward to yesterday. I was reading an article in BuddhaDharma  magazine entitled "Awaken with Them? Really?", by Zen priest Catherine Toldi, when I came across something that set me to thinking, particularly in light of that film. She said, "One way to understand delusion is that we think the stories we tell ourselves are true. There's nothing inherently wrong with this; it's how we humans make sense of the world. The trouble comes when we let our stories substitute for having real relationships with those with whom we are trying to [interact]."

I learned a while ago that most of what we believe about ourselves, others, and our experiences, are really just stories...narratives, if you like... that we tell ourselves. If you think about it,  our memories of the past are just stories we tell ourselves about what we think happened. Our plans for the future are stories we tell ourselves about how we want things to happen or work out. In truth, neither is real. We all recognize that often our  memories are faulty; they are filtered through our biases and prejudices  and often arranged to make us feel better about ourselves. Any beliefs we have about what the future will bring are illusions arising out of our desires or fears.

As Catherine Toldi points out, the problem comes from the fact that we tend to believe the narratives we are spinning are true, and then we make decisions based on those beliefs. How many times have all of us had a difficult interaction with someone and spent the rest of our day replaying the experience and the conversation?  If we pay attention, we discover that the story changes subtlety with each re-thinking, improving our part in it and most often parsing what the other person said in order to place more blame on them and less on ourselves. Again, to quote Ms. Toldi, "It's so easy to fall into nursing our internal commentary--speculating on people's motivations, replaying their offending words, conjuring up ways to cut them down to size. Our stories take on a life of their own, spinning away from the real person over there and how they may or may not actually think, feel,or intend."

In these ways, the belief in our version of the story begins to be perceived as what actually occurred. We then tell our story to others (usually friends or acquaintances predisposed to believing our version), who then begin to see the other person differently and more negatively, and often pass the story on. In this way, the story, which was never completely real to begin with, becomes solidified and interpreted as reality. The truly unfortunate result of this is that we forget our stories are just stories and begin to rely on them rather than cultivating awareness that allows us to see our experiences as they are, free of our biases and prejudices.

Each of our stories is unfolding from moment to moment. The most satisfying and authentic experience we can have results from accepting what is real, as it occurs, without judging it or needing it to be other than it is. When we do this, through awareness, we are able to stop the stories from spinning out of control simply by recognizing that they are just that...stories. At first, doing this is a little scary as we become aware of the extent to which we allow these flawed narratives to define who we are, what our life's are about. An enormous sense of freedom results when we recognize the nature of our own stories, because we come to see that the stories we concoct about those around us are equally illusory and prevent us from relating to people as they are rather than as we think they are.

The kindest thing we can do for ourselves is to free ourselves from our delusions and the stories that arise from them. We can then meet life head-on, as it really is, and fully experience it in all its colors. In a sense, by doing so, we are moving from fiction to non-fiction, and oh what a story that will be!