Stories and Telling

We all know at least a few storytellers. Some recount their achievements so as to brag. Some share others' stories to inspire. The more people talk, the more data we have to judge with. We don't necessarily judge in the negative personal sense; stories show us the differences between the facts and the meaning they hold for different people. Some of us people-watchers think the plot is just something to entertain or bring meaning to our leisure. Stories, and particularly storytelling, shows us much more about ourselves as people than it does as individuals. What is identity? Why can stories unite us, and which divide? The act of storytelling seems just as important to our daily life as the things that we use them to remember. We focus on the events because stories are meant to focus on upon events. Stories flow from our need to place meaning and events into our private consciousness no less than they do into a social context. Whether discussing different mythologies or religions in terms of the archetypes and trends, or to extrapolate the factors that determine a myth's success - these analytic constructs are themselves a sort of story. A writer can't approach his project until he admits that even his consideration of the writing process are stories, be they potential or actual. My attempting to comment on the writing process itself reminds me that I am a storyteller not only while writing a new story, but evaluating potential stories. I am positioned in time and flow through it such that I must justify the flow of facts and give hierarchy to different values, even if only to ground my experiencing consciousness. Eventually the thinker realizees that his life isn't just influenced by facts and flow, but is itself a story to be told - even prior to the end of our lives, or the awakening of our consciousness. Stories don't just reveal our inherent structure, they manifest our nature, in its changeability as well as its steadfast value. After making this observation, the relevant writer neither begins nor abandons his full effort. He is, was and always will be overflowing of self-revealing consciousness. No words describe his project, and yet his drive is more real to him than his previous influences. The only originality possible can therefore be no less than a response to and expression of his relationship to all other consciousness and potential. He is fooled before he thinks, knows before he notices, and becomes only when his imminent confusion questions his own potential. The story is not just an answer to our need for meaning, it is our expression of the manifold of questions. The falsity and emptiness of our stories' conclusions remind us to continue in the hopes that one may account for the endlessness of our pursuit.