about stories.
I’m remembering a song from my childhood.
“Tell me a story. Tell me a story.
You promised me. You said you would.
You gotta give in, ’cause I’ve been good.
Tell me a story, and then I’ll go to bed.”
The best were the stories my dad told about his life. I’ll never forget those. . . .
My friends used to say that no matter how bad things got, the experience was worth it, if we ended up with a story to tell. That thinking helped us turn the most unpleasant happenings into adventures and quests.
We would sit and swap stories while sipping wine, listening to music, and letting candles burn to set the mood. That wasn’t the only time we told stories though.
Stories were the way that we told each other where we had been and who we were.
As we got to know each other, it seems that we could hardly get near one another without telling a tale of an event in our lives. In the car, on the phone, we were constantly sharing a piece of an epic — all detailed and filled with conversation and setting — as if we were relating a scene from “on the road” movie we had seen at the local theater.
Stories of our lives were how we figured out what was going on.
We don’t do that as much now.
Now the information seems to come fast. The stories are shorter — less detailed, more factual. We relate data. The stories we try to tell aren’t as delicious as they once were. We don’t savor them anymore.
I vote that we slow down and start storytelling our lives again. I promise that if you tell a story rich with the wonder of living, I’ll be here alive with anticipation, ready to listen. Our stories are worth every second we take to pass them on.
The real ones are the best, even the real ones that only happened in our heads.
Let’s storytell our lives so we never forget who we are and what we are about.
