Stories Will Save Us

Is the uni­verse a friend­ly place? 

Albert Einstein thought that this was the most impor­tant ques­tion fac­ing humanity.

Is the uni­verse a friend­ly place? 

The answer is dif­fer­ent for all, but it aris­es from the same place. What we think of exis­tence – is it good or bad, right or wrong? – is direct­ly cor­re­lat­ed to the sto­ries we have heard, lived, and writ­ten on the stone tablets of our minds. Human brains are bio­log­i­cal­ly designed to orga­nize infor­ma­tion by image and nar­ra­tive. It is through sto­ry that humans make sense of their world. 

In fact, the abil­i­ty to tell, hear, write, and under­stand sto­ries is a dis­tinct­ly human endeav­or. Sapiens share approx­i­mate­ly 99 per­cent of our DNA with simi­ans; basi­cal­ly, we are still apes on a cel­lu­lar lev­el. Storytelling is where we dif­fer. You could nev­er change a monkey’s behav­ior sim­ply by promis­ing him lim­it­less bananas after death in some imag­ined mon­key heaven. 

Story, as it turns out, has been cru­cial to our evo­lu­tion, maybe even more than oppos­able thumbs. Opposable thumbs allowed us to hang on, but sto­ries told us what to hang on to.

But how to tell a riv­et­ing sto­ry in our cur­rent atten­tion econ­o­my? How does a sto­ry hold our focus when our brain is being ever trained toward dis­trac­tion? When we can get the same dopamine rush from a 15-sec­ond TikTok video, is it worth our time and ener­gy to lis­ten to per­son­al sto­ries that are almost ten min­utes long? If we believe that our atten­tion is a scarce and valu­able resource, couldn’t our time be bet­ter spent?

I believe that it isn’t just that we hear and tell sto­ries. The type of sto­ries we hear and tell mat­ter great­ly. We need to hear sto­ries where evil is van­quished, where some­one encoun­ters great mis­for­tune but grows wis­er for it. We need sto­ries that break our heart and then sew it back togeth­er. We need sto­ries that awak­en us to the won­drous and beau­ti­ful and bru­tal world we live in. Good sto­ries help us cope in an ever-chang­ing world that often seems to be spin­ning out of con­trol. As Neil Gaiman so expert­ly sum­ma­rized it, “Fairytales don’t tell chil­dren that drag­ons exist. Children already know that drag­ons exist. Fairytales tell chil­dren that drag­ons can be killed.”

We need to be remind­ed, over and over, that no mat­ter how hard our life is, there is always hope that things will get bet­ter. Think of it like this: If humans don’t get enough healthy iodine in our bod­ies, we absorb radioac­tive iodine that our grown foods absorb from the atmos­phere after nuclear test explo­sions. Yikes. 

I believe sto­ries work in the same fash­ion. If we don’t fill our­selves up with sto­ries of grace, humor, grat­i­tude, empa­thy, curios­i­ty, and hope, we’re more sus­cep­ti­ble to sop­ping up more poi­so­nous nar­ra­tives. So the answer to is the uni­verse a friend­ly place? is shaped and col­ored by the nar­ra­tives we choose to con­sume and hold as true. 

Please join us at Leeds Center for the Arts on Friday, October 21 at 7:30 pm for The Voices of Winchester: A Night of Storytelling, fea­tur­ing local sto­ry­tellers (like me!), artists, and musi­cians shar­ing just such tales. This is a free event, and food will be pro­vid­ed. See you there!