The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Everyone tells stories. We have to because the amount of life impinging upon us is to great to absorb and stories allow us to focus on a subset of reality in order to be able to process it. Stories are not only how we communicate with each other but also how we communicate with ourselves.

Stories combine context and knowledge in an experiential data reduced digestible packages which sometimes become passable batons to permit us to communicate with each other over space and time as movies, operas, paintings and symphonies. And they usually have a beginning, middle and end again to make them digestible but reality is less linear and less predictable and less digestible than this. 

Reality is decidedly not linear, it is nonlinear and we all carry with us multiple endings, beginnings and middles to choose from. Is this the same as a multiverse? Or parallel universes? Probably because we need to reduce the complexity of the real world in order to process it for one thing is certain, the universe we live in is quite dimensionally vast and it is also dynamically adapting as are we and everything in our universe (or universes).

In fact often times differences of option come from looking at the same reality from more than one perspective. Some people are better than others at tolerating ambiguity (diversity?). Some people feel threatened or confused by too many options but they too have a legitimate point for there are those who are too comfortable with ambiguity and too uncertain of where they are in their worlds which can make it difficult to properly adapt too circumstances.

This is why stories are so important. They are a means of convergence on shared realities. They may be wrong or incorrect depending on which perspective is the reference. But in order for a society to operate there do have to be some shared stories, just as for each of us to operate we have to tell ourselves stories which are fairly consistent or we would be all over the place never converging upon realities that are useful to us because they can not be operated upon or within.

Think about it.

What stories are you telling yourself? And your friends? And your neighbors? And you poling places?

Remember although stories are powerful and necessary they may or may not be true. And they may or may not be true at some points in time but true at other points in time.

If you are a creative outlier, you may have stories that are not mainstream and that may get you in trouble. Be conscious of the stories you tel others and the stories you tell yourselves and remember stories do have a context within which they live. They are not absolute for they, like the universe are constantly adapting tot eh dimensions they are taking into account.