Stories. We have so many stories. We live our lives telling them, repeating them, believing them.
We make up stories to help us understand something that has happened which is simply not comprehensible to us otherwise. We create stories to tell a great tale. We expound (and expand, let’s admit it) to be entertaining over the dinner table or on our blog or anywhere else we tell our tales. Sometimes our stories are so positively powerful that they can change lives. But often we create stories that limit us. These stories define us by reducing us. They also stop us from living in reality because we are wasting our precious present by rehashing the past.
We all have stories that we trot out. I’m not good at this because of something unfortunate that happened in my youth. Whenever I try this, something goes wrong. I can’t do that because my addictive personality makes it too difficult. We let these stories have dominion over us. We believe them. They gain a terrible potency that if we could look at them clearly we would never allow. Whoever among us wants to limit themselves and their abilities simply by giving up because of something that might have happened in the past?
As I grow older, I am becoming more of a fatalist. Not for what might happen in the future, but for the events of the past. So I’m a kind of backwards fatalist, I suppose. That thing happened, therefore it was meant to be. Seeing it from this standpoint takes away all the gnashing of teeth and wishing it could have been otherwise. Believing that it’s fate means that we don’t need to doubleguess what might have been, could have been, should have been. But the secret sauce is this: It happened when it happened. Not now. If I’m telling a story about it, the storytelling might be in the present but the event is firmly in the past. The story is not the thing. The thing, whatever it might be, is gone. It happened at a certain time and should not now be a part of my present.
This can be used for everything, including the kind of food we choose to eat and the kind of bodies we choose to have. What we have now may indeed be from choices we made in the past. We can’t do anything about that, but now, this moment—that’s alive. That’s something we can work with. In fact, that’s all we ever have.
Many times it would be better to let our stories go. To allow them to sleep in the past … where they belong.