Writing stories

I am often amused and bemused to realize I’ve been working on different versions of this same project for close to 20 years -- revising and reworking the narrative for who I am today. This endless task has kept me sane in many ways, allowing me to organize the meaning of my life into eighteen chapters.

It doesn’t seem all that different from my day job, writing scripts for television, narratives “inspired by real events,” fictional versions of the truth, organized into eight acts.

I used to think spiritual effort was supposed to help us “wake up” from the stories we tell ourselves about reality, supposed to help us live here in this moment, free and unfettered by our fictional versions of truth. But it has become clear to me that just like meditation does not stop thoughts, we cannot stop our own story-making. In the act of setting one story aside, another automatically composes itself along the structure of new insights, new emotions.

It has also become clear to me that’s exactly why we are here, why the universe peopled itself. We are here not to wake up but to dream -- dream up stories of meaning, revise and revise with new insights, until we dream up a story that rings true, a story that connects us.

“Restoration,” writes Peter Block, “is the willingness to complete and eliminate the power out of the current story we have of our community and our place in it. This creates an opening to produce a new collective story. A new story based on restorative community, one of possibility, generosity, accountability.”

I so much hope I am doing that.