We are extraordinary storytellers.
In our minds we create stories, dozens, hundreds of times a day. We create these stories to give the random facts and not so random events in our lives context. Most are created and lost before we know we've been there, but their meaning impacts us, consciously, some unconsciously. Some are mundane explanations for this or that, but many of our stories protect our ego, make us the hero, the other a villain. This justifies our decisions, our thoughts, our actions. Most are built around a single, simple observation, built into a tome, chapter and verse, one thought built upon the last, until in the end we have given context to an emotion, an opinion, an action. We tell ourselves these stories to protect ourselves. We do it all the time. Every moment, every day. Whether we want to or not.
Our fears, our anger, fuels our stories. A discussion goes badly. You are sure to hear about it in the morning. All night you lay awake writing a story. What about it that frightens you? You conjure lines for what you did, why you did it, what you add that wasn't there, what you remove that was. You describe the characters in your story, their motives behind their part in your play become chapters in their own right, and why you were right to do what you did, why they were wrong, or how they ally to you. You rewrite, discard whole parts, edit, and by morning in fits and starts you have written a book. You overhear a few negative words of a conversation that mentions no names, and fearful, you start to write a story that raises your anxiety for surely it was about you; you have been found out and struggle to verse your reason. A wife finds a charge for flowers she never received on her husband's card statement, and by the time he gets home she has written an entire tragedy based on that one isolated fact. Sometimes stories take but an unconscious moment. A car cuts us off and we find ourselves confronting a villain who was actually a noble person who for a moment wasn't paying attention. A nefarious device thwarts us, and we personify its intent. We enter the elevator with a disheveled man and by the third floor have given him a story. Other times a few real facts, real situations, are the foundation for a moments panic when our fear becomes realized, already played out in our minds storybook factory. We saw this coming in our story, we know how it will end. Our stories sometimes are there to give us courage, sometimes for anxieties, slights, threats, imagined and real, sometimes for imaginary and real epochs patched together to give meaning where separately there is none. Our stories explain our experience in a way favorable to us. They protect us.
All of these stories, these manifest molehills made into mountains, are built with assumptions. They are almost always negative, scary, fear and stress heightening. Its how we protect ourselves, getting ahead of the issue we imagine about to befall us, creating evil to counter our noble self. And we are almost always wrong.
From this moment on, whenever you can, write only good stories, make only good assumptions if you make any at all. See what happens. I offer you will find peace, possibly happiness. At the very least, you shall enjoy a good story.
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