Telling

I wrote this months ago but it appears blank on my blog so here it is again...

I went to a strategic planning conference on Friday and Saturday and one of the speakers was from the California chapter of Organizing for America, the organization that campaigned for Obama starting all the way back in 2004, and continues to campaign for his issues. Their lecture or workshop was about the importance of telling your story. They said telling the story of who you are is how you connect to one another, how you show others that you share similar values, and is how Obama connected with the American people. We had to tell a story of our own life, some challenge we faced and how we chose to deal with it and what the outcome was.

This was interesting in light of a recent spiritual book I read that said we have to learn to let go of “my story” and that this idea is a construct of the ego.  It says you are not “your story”, that none of the stories of your life belong to you, nor are they who you are.  When we continue to tell our stories we are building up and acting upon our egoic nature instead of living in the moment and being who we are at that moment. Our stories inevitably pit us as the victim or the hero, so by telling and retelling our stories we are identifying with a construct of how we think we relate to the world.

This resonated with me because I tend to retell the stories in which I am the victim. I had this surgery, I had this friend die,  I had this friend commit suicide, I have this health issue etc etc. And yet, do those stories really have to do with who I am now? I am not a victim in this moment and in this life, so letting go of those stories of self is letting go of my own ego, my own sense of how the world acts upon me etc.

            In The Unbearable Lightness of Being Kundera says, “While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs…but if they meet when they are older…their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different for each of them.”

            When do we reach that age?  Already, I am weary of dating strangers. I love hearing other people's stories and I love telling my friends stories, as you all know. But I don’t want to tell anyone new anything about me. This is partly why I want to date someone I’ve known my whole life; why I’ve switched form the desire for the exotic unknown stranger that I have yet to meet, to wanting the person whose history is my history; whose family knows mine, who was raised in the same town, with the same ideals, the same basic look at the world. Then there is much getting to knowing of each other, yet it can be of here and now, and can skip over the stories of the past, and how we shape the truths in infinite ways, so that no one truth is really true, but nor is it a lie. Maybe this is narrowminded, I’m not sure.