We Create Our Lives with the Words We Use to Live It
We each have a Story that defines our life, whether we realize it or not. We measure ourselves, our dreams, our accomplishments, events, people, ideas, and just about everything else with these Stories. At a certain level, doing so keeps us safe. The unknown is terrifying, so categorizing, labeling, and judging helps us to walk away from anything that might be dangerous, unsettling, or just not worth our time. Living by such a Story has its merits, but can also be (and far too often is) a gilded cage that keeps us trapped and limits all we might be.
Everybody have good and bad in them. But sometimes they so focused on sad, scary stories in life that they forget the good. When that happen, you don’t tell them they are bad. That only make it worse. You remind them of the good. —Tae Keller, When You Trap a Tiger
Those words, in a book I recently read after my 15-year-old daughter recommended it to me, are spoken by the main character’s Korean grandmother, whose English is still not perfect. The notion she is trying to communicate is not perfect either: I would have said that everyone has good and bad and infinitely more in them, but you get the idea. The point for me is that we create our lives with the words we use to live them. I can choose to see only “the bad” in someone or only “the good”. I can do the same for myself. I used to do it all the time, and not just when it came to people. I ascribed value and/or morality to just about everything, but is anything intrinsically bad or good? Perhaps most things simply are. If we do decide that something is worth evaluating, however, I’m thinking we should devote more than the time it takes to pause and consume a social media post on the subject.
Years ago, I read a book that turned out to be important to me. The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander helped me take some initial steps down the path of seeing differently. Here’s the opening of chapter one, which it titled, “It’s All Invented”:
A shoe factory sends two marketing scouts to a region of Africa to study the prospects for expanding business. One sends back a telegram saying,
SITUATION HOPELESS STOP NO ONE WEARS SHOES
The other writes back triumphantly,
GLORIOUS BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY STOP THEY HAVE NO SHOES
Those messages reveal two very different guiding Stories. What’s yours? Does it serve you now? Did it in the past? Is it possible that it never really did? These are important questions, and if you take the time to try and answer them, please keep in mind that you were not the one who started the Story you live by. Your parents and earliest caregivers (and every person and institution that influenced them) are responsible for that. If your Story turns out to be, as Shakespeare put it, “a tale / told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / signifying nothing,” I suggest you get out a pen and start rewriting.
