Stories Archives - Page 5 of 6

Write Your Way Out of the Story

July 30, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

The left hemisphere of our brain includes what Daniel Kahneman calls an “interpreter.” The interpreter is constantly trying to…well…interpret everything we experience. Since we find it easier to understand stories than details or information, the interpreter spins many a story to explain things to us. We tend to believes that these stories accurately represent reality. Occasionally the stories may come close to doing that, but much more often they miss the mark by a wide margin.

What’s worse, sometimes these stories get stuck in our head and continue spinning out of control, taking up headspace and essentially hijacking us by claiming a portion of our attention. There’s a simple three-step writing tool I’ve found to be really useful in such situations. I call it “Writing Your Way Out of the Story.”

Step 1:

Set a timer for 10 minutes and flow write (write without stopping to reflect, keeping your pen moving across the page). Let it all hang out. Don’t censor or edit. You’re not trying to look good or be reasonable. Think of it as emptying onto the page everything that’s been spinning around in your head.

Step 2:

At the end of 10 minutes, take a highlighter pen and skim what you just wrote looking for actual facts. “Jim didn’t tell me about the meeting” is a fact. “Jim is trying to sabotage me” is not. Highlight only the actual facts. The rest is your story about the facts.

Step 3:

Reread only the highlighted sentences or phrases. Alternatively, copy them on a separate page.

Separating the facts from the story about the facts often has the effect of dismantling the story, draining the emotion from it, and freeing you to either let go and move on or—if there’s an issue or problem to be resolved—figure out what to do about it.

The longer and more frequently we give free rein to the stories spinning around in our heads, the more we come to believe they are true, the less control we have over ourselves, and the harder it is to see things from any other perspective. These stories tend to color our worldview and they contribute to a cascade of stress, anxiety, and a myriad of other problems. Taking 15 minutes to separate the facts from the story has always been time well spent for me.

Explain Yourself

March 14, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

amazing grace (Photo credit: eschipul)

Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible. —Eugene Ionesco

I haven’t tracked this down, but I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said humans are cursed with explaining ourselves to ourselves. More often than not, any old explanation will do, as long as it can be woven into the fabric of our ongoing personal narrative.

It is a curse, a burden, a pointless exercise, and more than a habit. It’s an addiction. It separates us from our experience, too. We can’t be both explaining and aware at the same time.

But where—and who—would we be without our explanations? I think that’s one of those questions worth asking.

Who’s in Charge?

March 10, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Buddha is supposed to have described our minds as resembling a drunken monkey that’s been stung by a bee. The monkey mind—whether or not drunk, whether or not bee-stung—is a restless mind. It chatters incessantly, shifts from thought to thought, is easily distracted, undisciplined, and most importantly confused. Sounds a lot like ADD or ADHD, but really this pretty much describes all of us to one extent or another. It’s just that many of us are in denial about it. We think we—not some passel of drunken monkeys—are in charge.

There’s not much evidence to support that belief, however. What neuroscience increasingly reports is that our brains are doing far, far more than we ever imagined they were doing. Not only are they keeping us physically alive, they’re directing our thoughts, feelings, and actions. The majority of our “choices” take place at the unconscious level. We only think we’re in the director’s chair because we’re so darn good at spinning yarns to explain why we just did what we did, thought what we thought, or felt what we felt. We are, as one author has called humans, the storytelling animal.

Each of us undertakes the same major creative project, which is the story of ourselves. It’s a constantly evolving work-in-progress into which we weave everything we do, no matter how seemingly inexplicable those things may be. It’s our nature to create this story, so we’re very good at it. So good, in fact, that our audience isn’t even aware of the fiction. Those are the best kinds of stories, right? The problem is that our audience is us.

[T]he intuitive feeling we have that there’s an executive “I” that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along. —Steven Pinker

Our stories help us maintain the fiction that we’re in charge. So instead of recognizing and accounting for the vast expanses over which we are not in charge, we continue merrily along, spinning our tall tales.

It isn’t that we’re never authentic, never conscious, always asleep at the switch. From time to time, we are conscious, maybe some more than others. But the irony is that because we think we’re already always in charge—already always making conscious choices—most of us never learn how to become more awake and aware, never discover how to increase our ability to set our own course and make it so. Why bother learning how to do something when we’ve already mastered it?

Creativity

January 27, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 3 Comments

Dancing Girl (Photo credit: Just Mary Designs)

Creativity is not efficient. She has a different relationship to time than most of us. A minute can last a day and a day can last an hour. She loves all the seasons. She is on intimate terms with the sun and the moon. It is New Year’s all year long at her house, what with celebrations for the Celtic, Hebrew, Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, and other New Years too numerous to mention. Creativity loves to gossip with the birds and put on her masks and beads and dance with the animals. Although bright colors amuse her, she most often wears neutral tones. She is especially partial to off-white.

Some people consider Creativity selfish because she does what she wants I have always found her to be gracious and most generous. She is certainly complex. If you have only met her in a serene mood, her flair for drama may offend you. She is not your aunt with the porcelain teapot who plays chamber music. If you are one of those people who only go to see her when she is starring in a major melodrama, you will not hear her rain songs. If you insist she is mad, you will never see how still her face is when she returns from a dream.

Sometimes Creativity disappears completely or wanders around the back alleys for weeks at a time. She has a strong need to be occasionally anonymous. If you run into her at the post office line during one of these periods, you will probably not recognize her. She is in a different place. It is almost as if her blood has slowed down. When the blank period is over, Creativity brings her free self home with her. Her skin is new. She is ready to work. More than anyone else, Creativity understands the secret meanings of the months when nothing seems to get done.

J. Ruth Gendler, The Book of Qualities

The Book of Qualities is a beautiful little book that portrays human qualities as characters and gets to the heart of each of them. The assorted qualities Gendler brings to life also make a great journaling keyword list, too.

More on creativity next time!

Fear of Cannibals

January 20, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

or, Learning How to Read Our Fears

Fear is one of the components of any significant transition, especially those made in midlife and later. At least the fear that accompanies these transitions seems to have a different flavor, maybe more urgency. But fear finds all of us at some point in our lives. We are human; therefore, we have fears. The question is, what do we do with or about them.

Karen Thompson Walker, author of The Age of Miracles, gave a TED talk in June 2012 called “What Our Fears Can Teach Us.”

As we grow up, we’re often encouraged to think of fear as a weakness, just another childish thing to discard like baby teeth or roller skates. And I think it’s no accident that we think this way. Neuroscientists have actually shown that human beings are hard-wired to be optimists. So maybe that’s why we think of fear, sometimes, as a danger in and of itself.” Don’t worry,” we like to say to one another. “Don’t panic.” In English, fear is something we conquer. It’s something we fight. It’s something we overcome. But what if we looked at fear in a fresh way? What if we thought of fear as an amazing act of the imagination, something that can be as profound and insightful as storytelling itself?

She has an interesting premise, which is that if we look at our fears as stories, they might be able to teach us something.

Now we might just as easily call these fears by a different name. What if instead of calling them fears, we called them stories? Because that’s really what fear is, if you think about it. It’s a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do. And fears and storytelling have the same components. They have the same architecture. Like all stories, fears have characters.In our fears, the characters are us. Fears also have plots. They have beginnings and middles and ends. You board the plane. The plane takes off. The engine fails. Our fears also tend to contain imagery that can be every bit as vivid as what you might find in the pages of a novel….Fears also have suspense.

What Will Happen Next?

Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next? In other words, our fears make us think about the future. And humans, by the way, are the only creatures capable of thinking about the future in this way, of projecting ourselves forward in time, and this mental time travel is just one more thing that fears have in common with storytelling.

Of all the possible things that could happen next, what fearful outcome(s) do you focus on? What’s your fear story? Walker’s TED talk centers around the 1819 sinking of the whaleship Essex more than 3,000 miles off the coast of Chile–an event that inspired parts of Moby Dick. The ship’s sailors had to make a decision about what to do–mainly which shore they should try to reach.

Walker quotes Vladimir Nabokov as saying that the best reader has a combination of two very different temperaments: the passion of an artist to get caught up in a story and the coolness of judgment to temper his or her intuitive reactions to it.

The sailors of the Essex, Walker says, had the artistic ability to vividly imagine many horrific outcomes–including being eaten by cannibals–but they were unable to apply the coolness of judgment to them. They were not adept at reading their own fear stories.

Reading Our Fears

Who or what are the cannibals in your imagination? Why are they so compelling? What is the likelihood they will actually “get” you? Does their specter swallow your attention and take it away from what actually needs attending to or from seeing things more clearly, more coolly?

Properly read, our fears can offer us something as precious as our favorite works of literature:a little wisdom, a bit of insight and a version of that most elusive thing–the truth.

Watch/listen to the complete TED talk: