Story Time

“You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.”

~ Anthony De Mello

“The shortest distance between two people is a story.”

~ Patti Digh

Finding our way to the truth can be tricky.

A story can help.

Finding our way to one another can be tricky.

A story can help.

If ever we needed to live in the truth, and in connection to one another, it is now. Sharing our stories is a good place to start.

Photo by Maël BALLAND from Pexels

Spoiler Alert

In the age of fake news, it is essential that we are diligent to discern fact from fiction, and information from opinion. It is incumbent upon each of us to search for journalists who fiercely ferret out the truth, and tease the facts out of the rat’s nest of fabrication. When it comes to the news and our ability to make informed decisions, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth matters. Good journalism is the art of reporting the story in such a way that it shines a light on the truth.

In our personal lives, when it comes to telling a good story, there’s an art to that too. We are story tellers at heart, and we see ourselves in one another’s stories. A story is our own account of events and experiences, not someone else’s recollection. We tell our stories to entertain and inspire, connect and reveal, and a story that isn’t absolutely accurate can still be absolutely true. But have you ever been in the midst of telling a story, and suddenly someone feels the need to correct your telling of it? Nothing kills a good story like a self-appointed fact checker.

I’ll take an authentic story over an accurate one any day, and the next time someone steps in to correct my story, I’m going to try and respond the same way a good friend of mine does.

Now don’t go spoiling a good story with the truth.

I'll Show You Mine

“Every person has a story with the power to crack you wide open.”

Oprah

We are story tellers at heart, and we see ourselves in one another’s stories.

Why is it then, that we are so reluctant to actually tell our stories? The real ones. The messy ones. The ones that don’t have happy endings. The ones where we still haven’t figured it all out yet. I’m not talking about blurting everything out behind the cyber curtain on some social media platform, but in real life conversations, with real people, in appropriate settings.

When I was writing BLUSH: Women & Wine, it took me a long time to talk openly about my love, and my misuse, of wine. This was partly because I knew that I had my own hard work to do to figure it all out. But it was also because there was some shame connected to the reliance I had on my nightly wine to cope with the stress and painful parts of my life, and fear of what others would think if they knew. Shame and fear keep our stories under our carefully crafted wraps.

One day, in the midst of a catch-up phone conversation with a friend, she asked me what I’d been up to. Without thinking, I blurted out my story of the book I was writing about my relationship with wine, and my use of it as a very classy looking coping mechanism. There was a long, awkward silence on the other end of the phone, and I immediately regretted my impulsive vulnerability. But then she said, “You’re talking about me. But I would have been too embarrassed to talk about it if you hadn’t said something first.”

When it comes to our very human stories that connect us with all the other human stories, why wait?

Let’s be the ones to go first.