Excerpt – Listening To Our Story

Behind every person is a story.  And central to the journey is taking the time to listen to each other’s stories.  To do that, groups engage a process of writing and then sharing one’s narrative.  It’s a risky but deeply rewarding process of self discovery and disclosure.

The following is an excerpt from the Q2 workbook, which explores this practice.

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Stories

How many of you have a good story to tell?  A great party or dinner is always more interesting when someone shares an interesting story. It captures our attention as we imagine the drama, the characters, the tension and the resolution.  Everyone loves a great story.

Over the rest of the quarter, we will be listening to each other’s unique narratives, or stories. Each of us is a story.  Moments in our lives become words.  Days become sentences.  Years become chapters stored in complex network of the brain.  There’s a distinct rhythm to each story.  There’s the ups and down, the twists and the turns, and the goods and the bads.  We wake up with the possibility of “conquering” the day.  We encounter difficulties. We engage friends and adversaries.  We fight for what we believe in.  We stumble over things and at the end of the day we turn out the lights, hopefully a better person.  To rest well is a sign that things are okay.  There’s a beginning to our lives, mostly forgotten, remembered only in pictures.  And there’s an ending we have yet to live.  In between is the story, the mystery of our lives.  We can’t erase yesterday and we can’t write tomorrow.  We can only live in today.

Stories are the lifeblood of community.  They are the most common way we communicate with each other to relate what has happened or is happening in our lives.  Historically, before the Internet, the television, the radio, the newspaper and even the printing press, communities related through story.  They created a rich tradition of history in stories.  Parents would tell stories of their ancestors as a way to continue that tradition.

Relationship deepens when we become part of each other’s stories.  They are the most common way of relating with another person.  Someone tells a story about what happened and we think, “I know what that feels like.”  The story may not be exactly the same but we’ve experienced something strangely similar in mood and emotion.  We felt what that person has felt.  Stories create a shared experience with life and let us know that we are not alone in this world.

If you look at your history, you remember life through a collection of experiences, which are encapsulated stories.  Life is shaped by our stories.  They provide meaning to our personality and a context for where we’ve been.  The more we know our history, the more we can understand ourselves. They also provide a connection point between people.  Each experience in life becomes a connection point with another person to say, “I know what that feels like” or “I was part of your story”.  These connection points become the anchors in relationship we share with each other.  The more connectors, the more we can relate to another person.

And as we listen to each other’s stories, we begin to encounter each other.  We learn a little bit of history that makes each of us tick.  We learn the stories that have shaped us into the person that walks into the room.  And by listening carefully we discover how human we all are.  We discover that our similarity radically outweigh our differences.  We are the same humanity.