The Master Storyteller

"Humans create stories long before we are born, and we inherit those stories, we adopt them, and we live in those stories." -Don Miguel Ruiz

I never knew this, but I'm a great storyteller! I used to think I was too pragmatic, too practical to tell stories, to imagine fantasies, to create fairytales. Even in my writing, I've never been able to write fictional stories - my writing has always been about my own experiences, emotions, feelings, and lessons. But what surprised me just now reading Don Miguel Ruiz's "Four Agreements", is that my so called experiences are actually stories I'm telling myself. So I'm a personal storyteller - telling stories to myself, about myself.

Every incident that happens around me, I take it in, twist it, turn it, try it out a thousand different ways, and all the while I'm doing that, the storyteller inside me (my own mind) is judging, interpreting, translating, extrapolating - all fancy words for telling tales. Making up stuff. Making up lies. Fiction. I realize that there is no such thing as a fact. There are truths - universal, or relative, but no such thing as a fact. Only fiction. It's all fiction. Everything's made up in my own mind.

When a person says something, I interpret it to mean something else. When a person doesn't say anything, I translate it to mean something else anyway. If a person uses a certain tone of voice, I extrapolate an attitude. If a person does something I judge the "meaning" behind it. If my car breaks down right as I'm going to work, I read a story behind it. If a bird dies on my deck I figure it must mean something. I may be exaggerating things here to tell this story, but the point is - every little thing that happens around me is picked up by my mind, (much as a researcher or a scientist picks up his object of interest), tweaks it, pokes it, judges it, and puts it down with a judgment. The mind forgets (or ignores) that the judgment is only a theory, based on past "experiences", but once it passes judgment, the mind makes it a fact. From then on, the next thing that happens on top of it is sorted out, lined up, and trotted out as a fact, and so on.

But since the basis of these "facts" is an illusion, there is no basis. There's no basis for anything else to stand on it. So everything is inevitably an illusion. Fiction. Fantasy. Fake. False. A story.

This is how I tell myself stories, hundreds of stories, seemingly different but they're all the same. They're all based on my mind's premise that all these "experiences" are happening to me. I personalize them, give them color, paint broad brush strokes, sketch in tiny details, but in reality, nothing is happening TO me. Things just happen. People are just being themselves. Life just happens. That's the truth.

Stories may be fun when they're fairytales and fantasies, but not when the castles in the air collapse -the castles that I believe in. The mind is the master storyteller, but the stories are only fun when I don't really buy into them! The moral of this story is not to tell myself these stories. To retire from this job of my own personal storyteller.