A good friend stunned me some time ago by pointing out that I told a lot of struggle stories. My childhood. Money. Publishing. The winter. Politics. Fear. The economy. The world. I am a story-teller, and I live by stories and I teach story-telling, and I am very much attuned to the stories around me. Mostly, I hear struggle and lament stories. Bad news, angry politicians, terrorists and pirates, fires, floods and typhoons. Bad things happen all the time. People tell the stories of sickness, failure, of cancer, of their dying and lost pets, of their sick and injured spouses, children, and parents. People who don’t tell these stories – or listen to them – are share them are considered odd, myopic, insensitive or delusional.
This is, after all, the age of sensitivity, and insensitivity is considered a great crime in our culture, much worse than wrecking the economy or running bewildered people out of their homes. So it seems everyone is telling their stories of struggle, and getting lots of encouragement, and it seems I have been doing it as well. Yesterday, when I saw that the Bunker Hill Barn had collapsed, I started telling a struggle story to Maria. How rural life is being destroyed by the free-trade notions of the new economists. How family farms are vanishing. How noone cares about barns.
Listen to me, I thought. Another story of lament.
I think all of those things I just said are true, but I decided not to tell the struggle story of the Bunker Hill Barn. Instead, I decided to thank the old barn for its many years of good service, and bow to the winds of time. It couldn’t have lasted forever, and, in fact, hadn’t been used in years.
I’ve been shedding the stories of struggle and lament. I just don’t want to tell them anymore, I don’t want them in my head, I don’t want to hear them, and I don’t want that point of view. Life is by no means perfect, and there is great suffering and injustice in the world, and I know there always has been and suspect there always will be.
But our stories are important they define our past and shape our future. Stories are the voices of our life, the sparkling crystals of our imagination, the tapestries of our subconscious.
The story is that was a beautiful barn built on a windswept hill and it did much good, stored much hay, graced its surroundings, helped its farmer, posed for beautiful photos for an aspiring photographer. And then a winter came, as winters do, and told the barn it was its time, and just blew it away. The photographer started to lament this passing, and then decided instead to go find another barn to photograph. How lucky is he.