Mindfulness Moment

“I don’t need you to love football [soccer], I only need you to love something that brings you together with others whose love is pointing in the same direction.

For me, that’s football, but for you, it could be crochet, or Jane Austen, or distance running, but to be bound up with friends and strangers alike is the human condition, and to be in community is to be, for me, anyway, more fully alive.”

John Green

(And as the welcome line on my blog reminds me, “Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.”)

Mindfulness Moment

“It’s said that while Regan was being escorted around the grounds, he had one particular request:  he wanted to see the war room.

You can probably conjure up an image of the war room in your head… but here’s the thing.  That war room simply does not exist.  … Not one room remotely resembles the one Regan had in mind.  But Regan believed it must have existed, because he had seen it, somewhere.  And that somewhere, was the 1964 Stanly Kubrick film, Dr Strangelove.”

“We conceive media sometimes as just a thing that’s just kind of rolling or ambient noise in our lives, things we do to distract ourselves or turn our brains off.  And what I contend, and what the evidence largely backs up, is that this stuff is actually really meaningful.”

“How much fictional stories shape us as individuals and as a society, far beyond what we give them credit for.  You are what you watch.”

From the 99% Invisible Episode “You are what you watch.


As I’ve waxed poetically both here and in my storytelling panels/courses, stories and storytelling is one of the things, if not THE thing, that makes us human.  It is through story that we codify our lives.  If I were to ask each and every one of you to tell me the story of your life, you could.  And they would be rich stories, full of triumphs and tribulations, of twists and turns, of action and inaction, and they would be rife with meaning.  Through these stories we come to know about ourselves, about others, and about the world.  We create it all through story, and then we act out our lives in accordance with those stories.

It’s no wonder then why storytelling is so darn compelling for us as humans.  It’s who we are.

And because of this wonderous thing, the stories that we hear (or read, or watch, or…) can often be just as powerful as the stories we make up ourselves.  They seamlessly slot into the grand story that makes up our experience and view of the world, and they impact how we view, interact, and treat the real world and others within it.  They are not separate.

Which, to be clear, is not an automatically bad thing!  Great stories are one of the greatest gifts we can give each other.  And for that reason they are something that should be honoured.    To that end, we can strive to do two things:

The first is to craft and share the best stories we can tell.

The second is to treat stories in accordance with the power they wield, and to remain forever mindful of how they shape our memories, our reality, our feelings, and thus our actions and outcomes.  Remaining present to what’s so versus the context we believe is so that comes from stories, both those told to us (including by ourselves) and those that come from the world of entertainment.