We need to make time for our own stories

Stories are important, right?

Yes, they are; we, as humans, crave/need them for meaning and context.

A while back, you might have heard a story now and again around the campfire… odds are that it was a good story, and that you remembered it, and re-told it to keep it alive.

Today, countless stories come in over the transom every second… new brands, e-mails, RSS, TV, random people on the street.

We so desperately want to hear them, at least the good ones, craving that meaning and context again, so we try to process it all.

But we cannot. Even if we read for 24 hours straight, we would catch about .0000001% of the day’s dump (I heard yesterday that 150,000 blogs are created each day).

So, of course, it’s absurd to even try.

By all means, we should be on the lookout for good storytellers, but we should limit your intake and make time - lots of time - to create our own stories, with friends, family, co-workers…

Ready for the wild life?

Are you leading your own life, or the life you or others think you should be living? Do you belong or feel abandoned?

These are the gnawing questions put to us by David Whyte in much of his poetry and writing.

Not your everyday cocktail chatter, but important questions nonetheless! How does one begin to frame an answer?

Mr. Whyte, not one to abandon us, throws a life-line:

“Every courageous life is lived in the grit and difficulty of existence. Dante says ‘in the middle of road of my life, I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.’ A beautiful authentic line and one of the reasons that The Comedia has been such an abiding classic through the centuries of western literature is because it is incredibly sincere. He is not basing his knowledge on all-knowing competence. He’s basing it on investigative vulnerability. He doesn’t say to you he has these three rules, these seven laws. He says you know one day I just stopped telling myself all the things I’d been telling myself and I stopped needing to know all the things I’d been needing to know and I just actually started paying attention to things as they seem to be in their own voices.