power of story

I’ve been trying to understand the deeper significance of story telling as I practice it, listen to other story tellers, and hear their thoughts about the power of this practice.

There are different ways to look at story telling. Very simply, it can be entertaining. But usually, even if the story is entertaining, the experience seems like more of a truth telling and active listening exercise. 

I heard Desmond Tutu and his daughter describe it in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee formed after the end of apartheid in South Africa. They said that reconciliation consisted in large part of hearing other people’s stories, and being willing to listen with an open mind and heart. It was an agreement between story teller and listener that one was going to be truthful and the other was going to believe they were telling their truth, and try to understand their story. 

When that agreement is kept, there is no story that is invalid, because it’s someone’s personal story. The way they tell it is unimportant. What matters is the telling from the heart, and the listening with the heart. 

I heard two very different story tellers recently. One was a man working in software, the other a very experienced story teller whose work included traditional Jewish stories woven into her own life. She used story telling to work for peace, to help people grow personally and heal, and to educate. 

The software guy told a story about his discomfort with telling people about his job. In fact he was so uncomfortable telling the story, he seemed to be covering up what it was about in the act of telling it. I only found out what his story was about because I asked him afterward. It was like a double cover-up. In the story, he’s trying to hide what he does from his friends, and in telling the story, he tried to hide what the story was about. The listeners seemed as confused by it as I was. 

I identified with the software guy because I’m in the same type of job, and I also have been self-conscious about it. Because I have wider aspirations, I never wanted to be identified with just software. But in listening to him, I thought that I should accept all parts of me. If I’m going to be a story teller, every bit of my life reflects some part of my truth, including being a geek to make a living. I resolved to tell people what I do from then on with joy in my voice instead of apology. 

The Jewish story teller told stories about difficult times in Jewish history and traditional folkloric stories, interwoven with stories from her life and family. She brought these different elements together to give meaning through both factual and fictional events. But in listening to her, I felt that everything she said just radiated the truth of her heart. In fact, her heart was a very pleasant place to experience. 

At the end of the evening she said she felt that even the most difficult and painful events have some joy in them. And it’s how you tell the story that determines whether someone hears the joy or not. I took that to mean that it’s whether you as the story teller see the joy in it, and then reflect that from your heart. 

I think I understand stories a bit more now. It’s when we see each other’s hearts that peace and reconciliation comes about. There’s a sacred contract between teller and listener. Both roles require open hearts. I agree to tell you my truth and you agree to listen without judgement. Though no one will completely understand another person, that agreement provides the greatest amount of understanding. 

To feel heard and understood, by being as truthful as possible, is incredibly healing. To enter into another’s experience, through deep listening, is to feel one’s heart open. That’s the transformative power of the story.

the end of the tunnel

Until this week, I was getting very impatient with my progress in connecting with people in London. Though I can be somewhat introverted, I’m very outgoing when I want to be, and that’s how most people see me. So I was a bit surprised at the slow rate of making connections after four months here. I do have a handful of wonderful people around me, a couple of whom I’d say are close. But it takes more than a handful of people to feel at home.

I’m not working at a job at the moment, so that takes away a major source of establishing a sense of belonging to a group. Instead I’ve been focusing on being open and attentive to what life is asking me to do here. I’m operating on the assumption that there’s some important purpose for me in this place and I have yet to bring it into focus. So a big part of my initial exploration has to do with finding the people with whom I need to fulfill this purpose, the people who will teach me what I need to learn, and who will work with me toward that purpose. My tribe.

This week my outlook changed. I’ve been preparing to tell a true story at a small theater in London as part of my quest to use my voice more, both literally and metaphorically. I finally did it this week and the experience of doing that seems to have indeed opened an avenue for me to be with that tribe. I felt so at home there, with the storytellers and with the audience. I met and talked to the people I was looking for and had not found up to this point.

It’s impossible to say what makes one feel a sense of belonging. It may be a combination of doing what one absolutely must do at a certain moment, like tell my story, while being with people who felt a similar need to converge at the same time and space.

It’s been such a fuzzy time in my life. It’s like feeling around in the dark for the right road, the corridor that will lead into an opening where everything will be clear and my mission will be in focus. I suspect that this was a necessary period of stillness and darkness, where I was forced to just be with myself.  I was the company I kept, the counsel I sought, the comfort I needed. A gestation period. And though it felt like it would never end, thankfully it was finite.

That one moment of using my voice, and the meetings, emails, ideas, and activities I was led to as a natural progression from that event, feels like it led me out of that dark tunnel, into a clearing. The paths and roads are endless, and who knows where I’ll end up. But the possibilities are visible, brightly lit, optimistic.

Maybe it’s just that taking one action that brings out the brightness inside you makes the world outside seem bright and hopeful.

doing it over

Mom's Egyptian passport, which included me and my brother

It’s strange immigrating to a second country as an adult, after having undergone a major immigration as a child. As an adult who’s already had an education, a long career, and some accomplishments in life. I and others wonder why I would do such a thing. Isn’t it enough that I and my family have survived and thrived after one immigration?

In my mind I think of it that way… surviving an immigration.

I’ve reflected on it so often, the thing that changed our lives forever. The break with everything. Extended family, language, our very personality. I’ve explained my life in terms of that major trauma, as others might see the death of a parent, a divorce, violence, or addiction in their families as being the trauma that explains their psychology.

That particular trauma for me was a culture gap so wide, a loss of a world so different, that it amounted to a loss of self and being forced to invent a new one. After that, I went through many years feeling like I’m wearing a disguise, and acting it out so well that no one ever suspected my true hidden identity.

I grew out of that dual identity split mostly.

And though I have many reasons for moving to London, I’m seeing a new benefit I hadn’t consciously thought of. I get a do-over on the immigration thing. I get to do it as an adult who understands more about the world and the concerns of adults. I get to look at my parents’ struggles as new immigrants in America, not as a traumatized child, afraid for them, but as an adult who understands much more about the world and what motivates adults to do what they do, seek what they must.

Although this present immigration is so much easier than the first, there are still all the elements there for me to reconsider. The feelings of strangeness, alien-ness, and isolation. The feelings of not being wanted, of being inferior. Fear that comes from the perception you have only yourself to rely on.

But as an adult you see that though others are indeed different from us, they’re mostly the same. You see that feelings of inferiority are just byproducts of being new and inexperienced in a certain environment. But it’s only a perception. Where as a child I felt inferior not understanding the language, as an adult I know I’m not, and that languages are learned. As an adult I have some understanding of purpose. And I can calm my own fears and explain my perceptions.

In a way, by doing this over, I get to finally answer the child Gigi’s questions. Mainly “Why did you bring me here?” “Why am I not like the others?” “Why do they treat me this way?” And I get to bring her completely back to the fold of all my identities. The identities that one inherits, adopts, develops, to become a person, like any other.

surrender in Haiti and the Upper East Side

Recently I watched a PBS documentary on how people are coping with the recession on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a well-to-do, conservative area of town. The film approached the question from the angle of a well-established hair salon whose owner is a long-time resident of the neighborhood. Interviews with several of her clients revealed how their lives were impacted by the financial crisis.

Many of the clients had to cut down on the frequency of their visits to the salon. One of them said she and her husband had to survive on one income instead of two. Another had to give up a life-long dream of starting a coffee house, get a job, and borrow money from her parents. A fitness trainer saw less wealthy customers in his classes. Another woman said she and her husband were in so much debt that she decided it was OK to run up her credit balance a bit more on certain small luxuries, like a morning latte, as a way to be good to herself.

A man in the financial sector decided to get a degree in theology. To do so, he took out an enormous amount in student loans. He said when he goes to the gym, most of the people he sees there are unemployed and don’t know what to do next. When asked about whether he’s worried about paying back that debt, he said he decided to “surrender everything to God and let him take over.”

That statement struck me and crystallized what bothered me about the whole piece. These people all had to change their way of life. But it seemed like their suffering was not due to the life conditions they had to adopt, but to the fact that they wanted to keep living like they used to. I’m not minimizing or denying that this causes real suffering. What bothers me is how little people recognize their power to help themselves, me included. And the idea that if I just “surrender to God” I can stop worrying, relinquish responsibility (like paying off debts) and let God “take over” where I’ve failed.

This brought to mind a talk I heard Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat, Pray, Love fame) give about surrendering to a higher power in the creative process, in her case writing. She concluded that there is a creative spirit that an artist must surrender to and allow to work through him. But an essential ingredient in that process is showing up. Sitting at your computer, or whatever tools you use, working, sweating, being open, being there as a coworker with that higher being.

The Upper East Side people in this documentary have only their minds to conquer. Maybe that requires a form of surrender before people see their real options and their real power to change their circumstances.

When I look at the people in Haiti dealing with the aftermath of the unimaginable tragedy of the earthquake, I see a very different form of surrender. These people truly have no recourse within their earthly power. No family, let alone family to borrow from. No homes, let alone thoughts of work or career. No food or water for days. They raise their hands in the air and sing to God. They sing to raise each other’s spirits. And they dig with their bare hands.

It’s as if because they have nothing, they understand their real connection to that higher being, the real limits of their physical bodies and physical lives. That kind of surrender is not about the conditions of living. It’s about living or dying.

Maybe once we have the minimum conditions for living, after we’re so close to death, but we know we have been granted a chance to live, seemingly at random, that’s when we realize how much power we do have. Maybe that’s when we see where our personal power and responsibility end and a higher power begins. In that moment of awareness of the thin line between life and death, we grasp both our limits and our awesome potential for shaping and making the most of our lives.

stroke of happiness

I’m taking a lonely walk at Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park. It’s a warm, sunny winter day in San Francisco. I sit on a bench facing the Chinese pagoda next to the waterfall across the lake. An older man in a trench coat is sitting at the other end of the bench. We both stare at the water. He’s resting both palms on a wooden cane positioned between his legs.

He gestures toward me with his palm as if he’s introducing me, and says, “ah… and you?”

“Excuse me?” I say.

He stutters, “a…a… and you?”

“Oh… I’m taking a day off from work. Computers. Um… and you?”

He points to himself with a floppy hand, “haa… hack.”

“Hack?” I think of computer hackers, but he’s too old for that.

“Caa… cabbie… New York,” he smiles. “Called hacks.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Stroke.”

“Oh,” I say.

“Happy.” He points to the lake. Some mallards float by. He points to the bench. “Fff… fifteen… years.”

I point to my chest. “Ten years.”

“Family?”

“Ohio. New York too. You?”

“Wife. Dead.”

“Oh.”

He waves his hand as if he’s erasing the air, shakes his head. “Happy.”

“Kids?”

He nods. “Away. Far.” He puts his palm up in a stop gesture.

“I know,” I say. “You’re happy.”

“a… a… and you?”

After a moment, I decide… “happy.”

let your life speak

That’s a Quaker adage and the title of a book by Parker Palmer. The book looks at finding your vocation, and in doing so asks “Is the life I am living the same as the life that wants to live in me?”

Palmer writes:

Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about–quite apart from what I would like it to be about–or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.

That insight is hidden in the word vocation itself, which is rooted in the Latin for “voice.” Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.

As I try to get closer to my vocation, I can’t seem to resist falling back on the tried and true areas that have been the source of income and security so far. Although those things have also brought me intellectual stimulation, learning, and the pleasure of working closely with great people, I know that something else want to come through me.

In the past year, as I was opening my mind to big changes and new ideas, I would jot down words on random papers, books, folders all over my house, put thoughts on sticky notes on the walls, write in lipstick on mirrors. Words like: sing, speak, teach, write, recite, preach, facilitate, animate. Then I distilled those ideas to somehow using my voice more. I wanted that to lead me to the next vocation.

What I’ve done with this so far is to write more and to join a group of story-tellers. The story-telling will really put me on the spot to master my voice. The volunteer jobs I’ve set up for this year involve teaching kids about the Thames natural environment, and teaching older people computer skills. The opportunities to do these things came naturally, without much effort on my part.

The hard part is that other nagging voice of my prior life, the one that’s not only ready with a fall-back plan, but is actually nattering about scrapping the whole creative endeavor for a real job.

But I really want to give my life’s voice a go, and I take heart in something Benjamin Franklin said: whenever you are faced with a choice between liberty and security, choose liberty. Otherwise you will end up with neither.

uninvited guests

I’ve been delayed in the last couple of months, by some inconvenient emotions, from pursuing my “London launch” plan along the lines I’d originally imagined. Not that I had a specific, immutable plan. But within my being open to many possibilities in my new life, I still expected a certain level of enthusiasm, positivity, and enlightened intuitiveness from myself.  Well… things don’t always go as planned even when you have no plan!

Difficult emotions throw a wrench in my feeling “on track,” which I want to feel all the time, though that’s probably an unreasonable expectation. But emotions like anger, not being quite over an ex-love, fear of failure, loneliness, disappointment in a friend, resistance to change… they all seem to derail that sense of purpose or natural flow. How can one feel that assurance and confidence one minute, and then lose it the next?

What I know is that you can’t just get rid of emotions. They show up and the only way to handle them is to let them go through you, neither fleeing nor holding on to them. This Rumi poem says it best:

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Jelaluddin Rumi
Translation by Coleman Barks