Story is one of the great buzzwords of our time. We’ve latched on to the concept of story as a means of transformation in our lives, jobs and businesses. Its often used in conjunction with authenticity, a word that once held great meaning, and now functions as a marketing conceit used to sell blue jeans and restaurant chains to a populace that claims not to trust corporations.
Narrative as a literary device is a powerful thing. It places independent characters, locations, actions, and events into a coherent framework, with the goal of uncovering or stating a truth about the world. A well done narrative can bring unique attention to a specific convergence of space and time that otherwise may have passed us by. It is an important technique in our storytelling process, a layer of understanding added to the story itself.
Story, as I understand the word, is a factual, all encompassing account of a space/time convergence without alteration or input from a narrator. Based on this understanding, a story in its truest form is not possible within the bounds of human vocabulary. We come closest to a true story when describing events we can’t witness or fully understand, as in the varying creation accounts of antiquity and modernity. Our inability to understand and describe mechanisms powerful enough to create the universe impose on us the simple truth that it exists. No differing perspective can override the story we tell by by simply being.
The stories we tell, and the narratives we impose on them, are all refractions of this one story of existence we live out together. As human beings with incredible but finite minds, we need narratives to avoid being overwhelmed by the tsunami of stimuli surrounding us. Without them, the reality of existence would swallow us whole. Perspective shrinks the world into mini-truths that govern the small territories we inhabit. This relativity is an important and beautiful aspect of human existence, adding color and diversity to what would otherwise be a monochromatic canvas.
Narrative and story are two important, distinct elements of human understanding. It is important to recognize this distinction, because we invest a lot of time and effort in ‘changing our stories’, both individually and corporately. The desire behind this statement is not one of change within ourselves, but in the way others perceive us. In other words, we’re seeking a change of narrative.
In corporate terms, this alteration in narrative is known as a re-brand. Re-branding projects don’t seek to change the truth of a story, just the adjectives used to tell it. An adjective, as we (hopefully) learned in middle school English, is a word that modifies the central action of a thought. When correctly deployed, adjectives add distinction and clarity to an overly simplistic statement. Most of us know them as long words we used to make our research papers sound more impressive.
Most of my efforts at ‘change’ are like that; big words seeking to disguise lazy research and incomplete logic. Conversely, so much of what I’ve believed to be true and concrete is an incomplete perspective of that Big Story of existence. This belief system is equivalent to the biblical parable of the man who built his house on the sand, a facade that crumbles in the face of truth. The moral is simple: a perspective is only as strong as the truth of it’s foundation.
In our interconnected world, beliefs and perspectives collide constantly. Our small presuppositions are shaken daily as we interact with others who share our story of humanity, but find our narratives foreign. These collisions have sparked global conversation about religion, race, gender, nationalism, and every other narrative that we long ago embraced as The Absolute Truth. The world in its present state is frightening and exhilarating, an emotional skydive that forever alters our view of gravity. Some of us long for the ground before we’ve even jumped from the plane. Others return to earth with their heads and hearts in the clouds, shooting from the atmosphere into oblivion. All that’s left for the rest of us is to take comfort in absolution from earth and sky, and find freedom in the space between.
