As I watch my granddaughters at play, I notice that so much of children’s play is involved in creating stories; stories they enact through dress up, manipulating playthings, or lying on green grass or in their beds dreaming of being superheroes or mothers or scientists or veterinarians or wildlife adventurers, or…
I believe they create story to learn about, explain, and deal with life by practicing what it is to be in existence. They practice the practical, like setting a table, steering a toy truck, caring for their dolls. They manipulate toy people and animals all the while dealing with more abstract skills, like how to make a friend, how to be assertive or aggressive. Their stories are created by imitating the life they observe, as presented by adults in their environment.
For myself, I’ve never grown out of wanting to make up and tell stories, in fiction, essay, or poetry. It’s been my way to attempt to record or deal with emotions or make sense of life–sometimes all three. But it was in watching my granddaughters and contemplating my own story-addiction that got me thinking about the whole idea of story, itself, and I ended up coming to the conclusion that story is omnipresent throughout our lives, like the air we breathe…
Stories envelop us…
We walk through life in story, embedded in our own individual tale, one that we create the very moment we begin to live, and then leave memory fragments of it for others when our visit to Earth is over.
Not only that, we crave a good yarn outside our life’s bubble. We read stories, watch them unfold on TV or in the movies, listen in on the life stories of other’s via newspapers and magazines, hear tidbits of other’s stories from our friends–gossip.
Even most advertising is done in the narrative form, like how the new fantastic medication makes it so grandma is able to get out of her sick bed and cook Thanksgiving dinner. (Couldn’t someone else have done it, even if she did get out of bed!) Or the new medical miracle that allows Uncle Albert to walk his daughter down the aisle–all the while we watch these ads and listen to a fast-paced, rap-like beat of all the side effects that could harm or kill grandma or our dear uncle–a possible nightmare story right there.
From our own story bubble, we peek out and are diverted from the here and now of our own lives by these stories. Sometimes they penetrate us as we travel vicariously through the emotional drama of the characters, sometimes to educate, sometimes to make us feel grateful, sometimes to excite us out of our boredom, sometimes to scare the shit out of us.
With all the influences in and around us, we are constantly at work creating our own stories. What we do or don’t do with what’s thrown at us or what we stumble into or knowingly create. How we handle it all is the stuffing of our individual tales.
It’s not just individuals who have their narratives, couples create a common story as well (albeit through different viewpoints), like the how we met, our first date, and you remember when…?
Families produce their accounts of the generations that came before. How great, great grandparents came over from the old country, or were brought over as slaves, or how their land was stolen. How grandpa fought in the war and never returned, or came back home with a war bride and got a job as an autoworker, or a farmer, or became a bank robber. How one of their kids turned out to be a doctor or a mechanic, or bareback rider in the circus, or…
Community’s legends can often be seen on placards in significant places or heard on Pioneer Days when local leaders give speeches recounting the history of the area and its people. Who settled the area, who was there before that, why a certain kind of industry came into being in that location, how the land played a role in the settlement. How it’s changed over the years, or how it has barely changed at all…
Of course, all countries chronicle, as well. The story of their beginnings, who invaded, who won, who lost, what groups prospered–most likely leaving out or altering who did not…Another story…
Whether it’s the individual, the couple, the community, or countries, there exist numerous sub-stories within their stories, and variations of sub-stories within the sub-stories–like a universe of endless individual bubbles walking inside of couple bubbles, inside of family bubbles, inside of…and I didn’t even include the story of existence beyond Earth…
Wow! Now there’s a story inside of a huge bubble(s)…
It’s all mind boggling for me to think about life in this way, in an endless all-pervasive story of stories in a sort multi-dimensional Russian stacking bubbles occupying infinity…
Wow, again!
Returning to something I can get my mind around, I’ve concluded that our very existence is contained in story; it’s nothing we can escape from, and if we were to try…well, we’d merely be pivoting our direction, while still encased in our bubble because…
Stories Are Us.
For more SaturdayScribbles, scroll down to: “High Noon…or All’s Well that Ends”