Stories.

February 7, 2016

I grew up, as I imagine most of us did, on a diet of stories about heroes and villains; goodies vs. baddies, with dramatic crescendos, easy resolutions and happy endings. It was a fairly simple existence, where the maths always added up and people tended to get what we felt they deserved. Invariably, you’d get that little panic where you’d wonder how on earth it was going to happen as the pages left in your hand were dwindling almost to nothing. But in the end, by the time you turned that last page, everything was always resolved.

In real life, the maths is more complex. Our stories don’t seem to be as clear-cut as those we often read about. Good and bad aren’t always black and white enough for us to be able to take sides, and the heroes (because of course, that’s the role we cast ourselves in our own narratives) don’t always end up happily ever after.

We live in the tension of so much that is unresolved. We can try as hard as we like but it doesn’t mean that things will slot into place easily. Good things don’t always come to ‘good’ people. There is an imbalance we feel like a stone in the shoe, rubbing just enough to be uncomfortable. Most of the time it doesn’t neccessarily stop us from walking, it just means that it isn’t as easy as it could or should be.

If I’m honest, I’m often impatient to reach that last page, to be able to look back and see how it will be resolved in a happy ever after. I want to see the big picture, to make sense of it all. Sometimes it’s hard to trust that it will. Maybe that’s why we read and write stories where we can redress the imbalance, and why we feel slightly cheated if a film or a book doesn’t end happily. There’s a natural sense that there must be more. It can’t end here.

But, in truth, it is far more complicated than a simplistic storyline suggests; people don’t fall into easy categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in real life. It’s all just a big grey blur.

I am aware that even when I try (and I don’t always try), I don’t always play the hero. I imagine that at times I could well be someone else’s villain. Sometimes I am in the right, sometimes I am in the wrong. I’m not an easily categorised tick-box. Life is more nuanced than that. People are more nuanced than that.

Whilst we are living in the middle of our own stories, it is so easy to lose sight of the overarching story, the one that holds us all together. We can be tempted to categorise people into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ based on how they touch and interact with us, our plans, our perspectives and beliefs. But ours is not the only story being played out. We each have a unique experience which is intertwined with those around us, weaving the most complicated plot line ever imagined. And yet, we so often view our resolutions in the light of our own individual stories.

What would happen if we chose to view the bigger story more often? To recognise our own lives as interconnected with those around us, part of the patchwork of life sewn together across the planet? Would it make the tensions and the uncertainties in our own lives easier to live with, knowing that there is a bigger, wider way of seeing the world, full of beautiful, complicated, sometimes contradictory people like us?