The Stories We Tell

Storytelling. When it comes to finding meaning, it helps to try to pull particularly relevant experiences in our lives into a coherent narrative that defines our identity. 

Emily Esfahani Smith 

We have heard the phrases; 'a curated life', 'a meaningful life', 'living mindfully'. 

Some of the phrases have become catchwords, some have acquired an almost judgemental subtext, far from their original blithe use. I looked up a few whilst considering how to approach this post and decided that E.E.Smith's observation about story telling resonated the most. (if you are interested, her Four Pillars of living a meaningful life can he found here.)

We live. 

We get up, go to work (or not), eat, do laundry, grumble about the weather, weep in grief, fear change, shop, sleep, dream. We count our pennies, try to make do, practice our ethics, get along with our neighbours, try to keep cheerful, laugh sometimes, rage at politics and life's unfairness, try to mind our health and be good citizens of our own small world.

But I think that many of us also have a rich inner life which carries on invisible and irrespective of our outer circumstances. Does the desire to live a more meaningful life come from imagination, the inner life, the what might bes, the what ifs, the if onlys? Or does it come from depression, the I wishes, the surely there's mores, the desire to live bigger and better or the fear of going unremarked into that good night?

My father died a few years before my mother, and then my mother died. I remember in the days after her funeral when seeking to get my head around the enormous echoing hole they had each left, someone remarking that I was now the eldest of this section of the family. Now I did not just have my own horrible hole, but a horrible hole which I possibly could be helping others to navigate. 

Eventually it came to me that a way I might cope with this circumstance was to be a keeper and teller of stories. Our family loves stories; I imagine many families do. Everything from the story of the yellow tea set to the sagas of hilarious mishaps, with a few about soap powder, the greenhouse and dentures on the side. Of course I meant to begin writing them down and I haven't, but whenever a group of us get together, after catching up on news, out come the stories, some old and oft repeated, others which might have only recently been recalled. 

So, to the title: the stories we tell... which led to my choice of the scrap quilt image above. I made the quilt for the first child of the next generation and the fabrics I chose from the scrap basket have many stories. Fabrics  from Kenya where her mother grew up, scraps from my mother's dressmaking days including clothes she made for herself and my sisters, scraps from my children's and my clothes, old household fabrics which I overdyed for sewing projects, school uniforms, Sunday frocks, other quilts long since given to others. That rather odd looking quilt is full of our stories.

I don't seek to live a curated life, or even a particularly meaningful one, but I do believe that the stories we tell, listen to, repeat, may become the essence of us and a how we are privileged to exist in other's memories. I collect stories, I tell stories, I often make people laugh with my stories; stories recall the best of family and friends who have gone before us.

I intend to live a storied life of little meaning but much entertainment. Do not underestimate the enduring power of a good story to both yourself and your listeners. And perhaps one day I will have the time to write some down.