The whole world seems to be made of stories.

I’ve written in recent posts that I’ve been trying to engage in the challenge of redefining this world as something other than hostile, dangerous, and unknown. As I turn my mind in that direction, I’ve begun to notice how prevalent stories are; and how blind I’ve been to their pervasive influence.

What do I mean? Well, stories are about something. They create a process of relationship between one thing and others; they have a beginning, middle, and end. They help situate a person in time and place, and relate to other beings or forces or objects who are also situated in time and place.

I used to wish that I could transcend culture and context, and experience things with pure perception, to be in a world of universal truth. This is in fact the path of the mystic, to unify with the One that is beyond time and space. By definition, that One is eternal, nonlinear, without story but encompassing all stories. And this is the goal and the heart of many internally-oriented meditation techniques: to quiet the mind, to step beyond the ego-self that binds us to this time and this place, in order to access that which is transcendent.

But the instant you descend into a world of time and space, something must occur to mediate between that which has descended and that which is still eternal. This is language.

The instant you inhabit this world, language spins out and becomes story.

Thus, we cannot help but inhabit a world of story. Everything has a story. Geologists tell us the story of how the layers of soil and sand and glacier and river came to create those million year old rock layers. Astronomers tell the stories of the birth and death of stars. Entomologists tell the stories of the life cycle of insects. Journalists keep telling us stories all the time about all sorts of things.

I’m discovering that many of the needs I are yet unmet feel as if they were focused around finding stories to fill my life. I read about a broad variety of topics and try a wide variety of things, and underlying it all is a desperate need to fit within a set of stories. Not just one story, but many.

In some ways it’s sad that I’ve detached myself from both my ancestral culture and my religious upbringing. Their values clashed with mine, but those communities nonetheless would have provided me with sets of stories that could fill this gap. Indeed, seen through this lens, I realize that my entire adult life I’ve been searching for stories to belong to. I found a few really good ones — a spiritual path that I strongly resonate with; a marriage to a woman I love deeply. But even these major things are fragments of a whole. A spiritual practice or a single relationship cannot sustain the entirety of a personal mythology. They form the foundational structure, but I’m missing … details.

It’s interesting, too, to look at our culture and see how deeply embedded storytelling is, in the many forms of entertainment and sports as well as in the news (they still call them “stories” in journalism). So really, everybody’s looking for stories to enrich their lives.

Why is that though? When I observe my own life, I realize that there are equally as many stories that I pass by. I used to be all into nature awareness. Now I hardly care unless it hits me in the face. Noticing stories of local wildlife doesn’t get me any farther ahead in school. Noticing the patterns of the neighbors doesn’t help me survive any better. So in some ways it’s the blinders I already have on that keep me from paying attention to the many stories that litter my feet.

But above and beyond that, I realize, I haven’t been trained in the story-language of everyday life. I was a precocious reader, and academically accelerated, so from early on I found my niche in reading — in English. It provided me the needed escape from the drudgery of school and suburban experience that was my life. So, as I’ve alluded to recently, I’ve developed in an imbalanced way. What I haven’t learned as well is other forms of language than written words, other forms of relationships than mind-to-page.

When I was in college I took a peer counseling class and then applied to be a peer counselor three times, but at every audition I failed miserably. I had the empathy, but it was untrained. I didn’t know how to meet other people where they were. I’m a little better now, thankfully, but when it comes to many other things I feel thus untrained, and so overwhelmed; like when I face the natural world.

Moreover, bringing my attention back to this world means, in a big way, admitting how many stories there really are here, and how much time I’ve spent ignoring those stories. It feels like coming home to my own buried guilt and self-denial.

All of this put together forms a block to connecting to alternative types of stories. Just the awareness of these things helps to begin dissolving it; but it really is huge to suddenly be adrift in a sea of stories in foreign languages, no idea how to keep a footing, no idea when I might be sucked under, except the one big tool I have, which is going back to reading English somewhere.

But I’m tired. I’m tired of looking for stories when I live in the middle of them. I’m tired of not understanding the native language of the here-and-now. I’m tired and I think I should do something about it.