Jewish Life Digital Edition November 2014 | Page 72

SERIES

PROJECT SHALOM

WITH THE SUPPORT OF

The stories
WE TELL

Are you living
someone else’s script?

WE ALL LOVE STORIES, AND FROM THE TIME WE
were small children, we enjoyed listening to
stories. Stories are really our first introduction to organised ideas about how the world
works. If you think about a story, it has
characters, and those characters have personalities. It has a plot. And so stories really
teach us about life, either in literal form or,
in the case of fairytales, in symbolic form.
As we grow up, we are taught to make a
distinction between stories and real life,
as if stories and real life are separate realities and different contexts that somehow
don’t belong together, and are two different spheres of existence.
As we grow older, we discover that living in what we are told is the ‘real world’
usually, if not inevitably, means relegating our stories to mere entertainment,
distraction, or pastime. We might even be
told when we’re children and we try and
relate an incident, “Don’t tell stories,”
meaning, “don’t tell lies”. And, as children, maybe we tried to express what we
meant in symbolic form through the story. But, when we’re told that our stories
are lies and that we shouldn’t tell them,
then we get to see stories as something
separate, or something that’s not acceptable. And so we stop telling stories.
Stories then become to us what is referred to as fiction. And, strangely, the
real world or truth, so called, is described
as non-fiction. Whatever is not a story or
a fiction, in other words, a non-story or
non-fiction, is real and valid, and therefore worth taking seriously.
This phenomenon is as strange as it
sounds, and yet we all oblige and give up
our stories in the name of growing up or in
the name of being sensible and rational.
Very often, when small children share their

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stories with us, when they share their fantasies, their daydreams, or their ideas, we
laugh at them or ridicule them or patronisingly say things like, “That’s so cute.” Seldom are the stories told by children heard
for their wisdom or their messages in symbolic form that they convey about the
child’s experience, or about the child’s view
of the world; it is embodied in the story.
The older we get, the more we become shy
and self-conscious, if not outright embarrassed or even ashamed about telling our
stories. Because stories are seen as something unreal and not something that mature
people tell; to tell stories actually requires
courage. And very often, people only start to
tell their stories when they have had a fair
bit of alcohol. And even with fictional stories
or jokes, people find it difficult to tell and

feel shy or embarrassed when they have to
tell even a joke, let alone talk about their
own life story. We are led to believe from
early on that taking our stories seriously, let
alone explicitly and consciously living our
stories and our dreams, is somehow less valid, less worthy a reality than the so-called
real world that we are conditioned to and instructed to inhabit by our schooling and authority figures, who undermined our stories
throughout our lives.
People in authority, including so-called
experts, gain power over our lives by specifying for us what aspect of our lives, experience, thoughts, feelings, tastes and behaviours are valid and acceptable and what
are not. Just picture the bookshelves of
bookstores that you like to look at and
think about all the books on self-help, on

PHOTOGRAPH: BIGSTOCKPHOTO.COM; PORTRAIT: SUPPLIED

BY LEONARD CARR