Have you ever noticed that when you and your partner are telling stories about the things that have happened to you, the stories get tighter and tidier as time goes on? Details get omitted if they don't contribute to the way you're interpreting it for the friends you're talking to at the moment. You and your partner may even engage in a subtle public battle over the meaning of your shared past, like a watered-down real-life Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
Our life has a layer of incidental detail that influences the way we experience it. In the retelling, we strip off these details to make neat narratives that are easy to relate and easy to hear and make us look clever and entertaining. These narratives are malleable for a time, like clay, but eventually they ossify, hardening into bricks. When we look into our past, these stones fit together without gaps to form a path ... a path sturdily constructed to answer the question "how did I get here?".
We simplify our stories to make them easy, but the truth is that our lives are not steps from one stone to the next. They're buzzing with possibility, with different things to notice and different ways to think and feel. A life lived consciously cannot be distilled into a novel.
This phenomenon came up in a conversation I had with some friends; the Buddhist tradition explicitly fights it, making an effort to include all the details when events are recalled. It honors the listener by assuming they're smart enough to come to their own conclusions. Todd Kashdan recommends that when you have a good experience, you should try not to pigeonhole it with an explanation - the moment you do that, the event is dead. If you allow the experience to be surrounded by all the tiny details that came along with it, you allow new meanings to continue to be created, and your happiness to go on.
Robert and I have very different story telling methods. Robert tends to tell the punchline first "Turns out she was actually a man!" Then tells the events that led up to the punchline. He feels that people get bored with the story and need to be hooked in by the punchline first. Unfortunately the story becomes the boring part because everyone knows where it's going.
ReplyDeleteI tell stories chronologically but Robert and my Sister both agree that I add too much detail. I tend to have "asides" where I explain little things I think make the story richer: "A Fixx song was playing in the background (the one that was used in the movie Streets of Fire, but not the extended version)". Both Robert and my Sister want to strangle me at that point. Of course my Sister admits to having ADD and can't sit still for a second. She'll often tell me, "you're losing my interest".
As we've grown older, Robert and I do in fact have stories we've honed specifically for retelling. Some facts are omitted. Sometimes I'll even ask, "do you want the long version?". If the listeners don't seem ready to hear a lot of detail I may go Robert's route and say, "Turns out she was actually a man".
I have a strong tendency to oversimplify - I like people to think I'm clever. Actually, turning that around, maybe I'm afraid to look dumb if I tell a story with all that seemingly extra stuff in it. Anyway, I'm trying to fight it.
ReplyDeleteJack Ricchiuto told me about a Zen practitioner who was going around interviewing storytellers. He talked to hundreds of people and came away with maybe five who didn't omit the extra details. It's pretty rare.
The problem is time and interest. What one of us might fascinating, such as which movie the Fixx song was featured, are just extraneous BS to others. I'm never sure how patient and interested the listener is and whether I am overstepping my right as a storyteller.
ReplyDeleteWhat he said.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, my dad can wax on for a half hour on what he had for breakfast. Depending on whether I have laundry to fold and nowhere to be, I might listen semi-patiently or say
"Dad, Dad, Dad. I just wanted to know what time you wanted me to pick you up."
But isn't that just because we're all in such a hurry? Our reactions - Donna wanting to get to the information she's responsible for, my fear of looking stupid - it all boils down to wasting time. That's fine, but we're sacrificing mindfulness to achieve that. Specifically, when it comes to retelling stories from our past, we're sacrificing our ability to interpret the events of the past in new ways.
ReplyDeleteThere are limits, of course. It probably doesn't do anybody any good to spend more time talking about breakfast than eating it. I don't know where to draw the line. Is it some kind of human element that makes it worth telling the details? Or nature? Part of what keeps me terse is the fact that I don't know what kinds of stories (and what storytelling contexts) benefit from including all the details.