The duality of stagnation and growth compels me. I want to spend my life engaging in struggles that allow me to grow into a more capable version of myself. I’ve already experienced this kind of growth in many ways - my intellect has been challenged by mundane research projects in school. It’s been felt viscerally climbing in the wilderness, far from the support of civilization. Each time I’ve grown, I’ve gained some kind of new understanding by seeing in a slightly different way than I did before.
Also constant has been my desire to share these revelations with others as stories. The ways of seeing I’ve discovered feel like gifts that I have to share, or their value will be wasted in the isolation of my own sight. Storytelling is my vehicle for sharing perspective. It does not feel coincidental to me that this is also how I most easily visualize making lasting, beneficial change in the world around me. And I now see this as the thrust of my life - leaving the world a more hopeful and peaceful place than it was when I was born.
This motive is somewhat paradoxical in contrast with the fact that, as a kid, I often sought peace by escaping the outside world. I did this by retreating within my imagination. The peace I found there was a gift that I learned to judge harshly as I got older and “grew up.” Fear-driven advice from without gradually seeped into my consciousness, and negatively affected my view of traveling inward. Even now as I write this, I feel the twinge of self-imposed judgement. “Escape is selfish and cowardly,” I came to believe. Worse still, the peace ends when I am inevitably brought back to reality by the growl of my stomach, or the puzzled look of someone waiting for me to do something. What lasting good could I do by sitting around imagining?
The Microcosm of School and Childhood
Just as I gained perspective from without while researching topics for school or when I was climbing mountains, the peace I found while daydreaming as a child was born of seeing things differently. Within my imagination, I was not stuck, as I so often felt within a classroom with my head down, math quiz and pencil in front, the problems out of focus. I accepted the challenge of schoolwork zealously as a kid, particularly where my flights of fancy bridged the span between my imagination and the outer world easily. In art, history, and English class in particular, my inward experiences felt like they were more of an asset than a hindrance.
Around age twelve, my attitude towards schoolwork soured. I still held my prized subjects in high regard, but dreaded math. The practices within Algebra textbooks seemed like an arbitrary struggle - “remember the rules, and you’ll get the right answer,” my teacher said. My disdain for math was nurtured by a lack of discipline, but in a prevalent sense, it was also nurtured by the educational system presenting it to me. I didn’t know what I could do with the mastery of these rules until the first time I attempted to write a program in C# some fifteen years later. In 1998, the only motive for mastery was getting a good grade. Good grades meant staying out of trouble with my parents and teachers. I failed at this, too. I did not keep up with the linear progression of learning math, and in the meantime, I continued to escape within.
By the time I was a teenager, I saw the wisdom in abstaining from inward journeys because of what I was leaving behind - i.e., social skills that were laying to waste, and which were of increasing importance in the hierarchy of highschool. This judgement did not keep me from continuing to yearn to see things differently. In the hallway between classes, I oscillated between awkward silences and half-cocked interjections into conversations that I had often only heard a fragment of. My friends would intermittently see my eyes glaze over, my focus obscured by a thought more freeing than navigating the social norms of the present. Then, with a deriding pang of self-judgement, the people around me would come back into focus. Their attention would usually have long-since been redirected elsewhere.
Giving Away
I believe that my self-judgement was an instinctual tool, however incorrectly applied, towards an internal push to enact an important subsequent step: Bringing back what I had seen differently to share with others. This is where storytelling becomes so powerful, not just as therapy for myself, but as a way of connecting with others - and hopefully benefiting them as well. The only way my wandering sight can manifest as something valuable to other people is if I share what I’ve seen.
With such an impetus for storytelling, it is sad to admit that I have not written many in my life of thirty-three and a half years. I’ve hesitated and my craft has stagnated mostly due to the fear of being misunderstood or judged as a hack. I also recoil at the thought of being seen as self-aggrandizing. Finally, I’ve hesitated because of the well-meaning advice of family members who feared I would succumb to the “starving artist” archetype. And so I waited, and years passed while I wondered what was the best way to avoid pain and discomfort while still living a full life.
If storytelling is how I see myself leaving the world as an improved version of the one I was born into, what will happen if I do not tell stories? First, my experiences won’t have a chance to be heard. In silence, I’m afraid to think of who might have been helped by words I would have shared but for the fear of being misunderstood. And for all my fears of being seen as self-centered for telling stories, there’s a sound argument for being labeled selfish when we believe we have the power to help anybody, but choose not to use it to save ourselves discomfort.
I imagine myself reaching the end of life having never shared my experience in a way that helped, even if hearing my stories only might have helped a few. Selfishly, my anxiety and sadness becomes unbearable as I imagine becoming progressively alienated in my half-hearted attempts at connecting with others. It is the saddest thought I can think of to die disconnected, my gift of living wasted, enveloped in the enormity of my unrealized dreams.
The stasis my fear has produced is like a shelter that drenches and freezes from the inside out. The fear is a lens that I have stared through most of my life, and it has protected me from the disappointment of others misunderstanding me in one way, while ensuring that I am not understood in a far more meaningful way. In this stasis, my work never begins. It is destroyed in anticipation before it can be made and shared to the actual benefit or detriment of anyone.
Discovery is a Meeting
At their best, stories invite us to discover for ourselves. There is a huge difference between being told about an experience and engaging in exploration to find the experience for yourself. All the same, exploration often begins by hearing from others who have gone and seen before us. Then, with our curiosity engaged, we begin our own exploration, and discover for ourselves.
Such moments of discovery are some of the most full and rewarding times I can recall in my life. The discoveries themselves have not all been of tremendous weight or importance, but instead seem to derive their value from a grounding effect in the present - a sense of connection between what formerly seemed to be disparate entities. At these times, my brain grappled as such - “Why now, and never before, have I thought of this, in this way?” The connections often come because we visit life from a new perspective. It all happens because of where we are, and when we are there.
In the ancient Pali writing of Theravada Buddhist scripture, the term ehipasiko emerged. Loosely translated, ehipasiko means “come and see for yourself.” Genchi genbutsu, as it is known in the Japanese methodology of Kaizen. In this sense, my ability to tell a good story - the kind that will incite others to discover new ways of seeing for themselves - lies in continuing my own explorations as well. And so, what I hope for myself - to learn, grow and live a full life - is what I hope for others at the same time.
My growth will never be relegated to one activity. It lies in traveling and climbing, drawing and photography, building and gardening. But for now, I will focus on the familiar and most immediate way I know of growing: Reading and Writing. If something interests me enough to learn more about it by searching the internet, or inspires me enough to write down a blurb to expand upon as a story later on, I’ll do so. I’ll leave no more blank pages, and I’ll reserve my judgement of my own process of learning.
I commit myself to storytelling as the way I choose to let my moments be full between now and the last. I’ll let myself live them for the most they have to offer.