Making up stories as we go

Some time ago I wrote a piece called ‘Repetition.’ http://walktokaw.blogspot.com/2012/06/repetition.html

I acknowledged that more or less everything had already been said and written. And, in a general sense, I still think that is true. It is in the particularity of each life that most newness occurs. If you haven’t heard the one about … well, you might find what I am about to tell you funny.

One question, then, is what does bear repeating? Are there truths that we want to hear again and again? I don’t necessarily mean the big truths that might be true for our whole species for all time. Though when I suggest that there are individual truths that mostly resonate within each person according to their own history, I don’t mean to merely point toward some disconnected relativism.

But the Truth and the truths are all over the place. Uncertainty is in abundance. And so I come back to ‘Story.’

Stories are the collections of words we tell ourselves and each other to try to connect the dots, to make some sense, to know what we mean - what everything means. And now, I have gone too far.

That ‘everything story’ is beyond our grasp, however much we sometimes seem to want to hear it and finally ease our uncertain minds.

Fortunately for our sanity – what we call being healthy and generally satisfied with our lives – we live much of the time in the particular, content with the truths close at hand. Stories of love and hate, success and failure – my family, my work, my friends – well, you know the tales that we tell. We weave in some strands of bigger truth and then we get the fabric of our life.

But even one life, by the time you try to tie it to all of each person’s context is a story too big to tell. And so we simplify and generalize some more. In short, story is mostly a kind of fiction, an abridgment of the empirical world. It is the collection of words our storytelling self tells and writes to connect some of the dots so that we can see a pattern, so that something – even a little something - makes sense.

Our other self – the material animal, traveling through time and space, this container of awareness, of consciousness, of our being - steps and stumbles through the particular world. This too, as I am saying it, is a story we tell and we pinch our flesh now and then and conclude that we are not dreaming. And then we savor a bite and a drink and - I do believe she just smiled at me.

This is as real as it usually gets, it seems.

I’m not making this up. That is, someone, many some ones, have already beaten me to describing this idea. I’m only telling it again with my particular spin.

Here’s a piece of the whole as I see it:

My wife lost her library book several days ago. In our household, my role is to find things. I generally have a knack for seeing things – that is their images – tucked into a corner of my mind – call them synaptic clefts or neurotransmitters if you prefer. I recalled Dawn holding a book in her hand and saying something about taking it along with her to an estate sale in case her friend took too much time looking everything over.

A day later the book was nowhere to be found in the house. Dawn was certain she didn’t actually take the book into the estate sale, and her friend, who is particular about stuff, had insisted over the phone that she hadn’t picked it up by mistake and taken it into her house. I was pretty sure I saw the book in Dawn’s hand the morning before. Dawn said she had looked in the car.

So after several turns around the house myself, I employed my brilliant powers of deduction, my repeated recollections of my wife not managing to see what is in front of her nose, and I determined that there could be only one answer. So sure was I that I had crossed all the ‘T’s’ and dotted all the ‘I’s’ of this story that as we walked toward the car, I bet my wife an ice cream that I would find the book in the car.

I reached my hand under the driver’s seat, looked under the passenger’s seat, checked under the sunshade in the back seat – and Voila – we were off to Silas and Maddy’s for ice cream: A double dip waffle cone in a dish with two spoons – pralines and cream and triple fudge. We walked to the park next to the Watkins Museum and sat on the bench under the bamboo shelter. The evening was perfect for June.

As we dipped our spoons into the melting ice cream – I used the cone for an occasional spoon – a bunny you could have cupped in two hands nibbled green grass several arms lengths away and the sky was not cloudy all day.

Sometimes I prefer life to stories. Sometimes stories connect the dots. Give me a double dip cone in a dish with a waffle cone spoon. Playing with uncertainty can be sweet.