Story Resolution

A matronly figure in her mid-50’s was jostling her luggage into the overhead bin. She paused to study me and my ponytail sitting by the window, then she maneuvered into her aisle seat. Holding her matching seat-belt ends in position, she turned to me and announced: “I’m a dyed-in-the-wool conservative”. She punctuated, “click!” with her seat belt.

I was suppressing my vertigo and considering my options. We would share our flight from Salt Lake to Spokane for nearly two hours, a calculation I suspected she had already made. With a mixture of excitement and reticence I decided to take the risk. I decided to request a peek behind her “Conservative” curtain.

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Edward, now in his 70’s, confessed his failing memory, then he disclosed his identity-transforming secret to his daughter Jean. His disclosure was born from careful calculus. He’d thoughtfully weighed the benefits and risks: the benefits of helping his family help him through decline, the risks of self disclosure that had silenced him for over 60 years.  Jean, her mother and sister, have been reprocessing their identities ever since.

Jean’s foundational family story, one she’d co-nurtured with her mother and sister for 40-plus years, was floating in vertigo. Jean was stunned by the presence of her habitual self condemnation, and her condemnation of her father. She had been blind to her pain from self hatred and blame, now visible in contrast with its growing absence.

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I poked my head from our front door to smell the air. The mysterious tailless cat was sunning on a porch chair, confidently donning his gray and brown striped suit against his bright white belly. I petted him. Later, my wife Dacotah met him, petted him, and called him “Bob”. Bob was satisfied, we were passable petters. He lounged on our porch for several days and listened for our floor to creak, his signal of our opening door. With each opening, Bob greeted us with his disarming enthusiasm, an enthusiasm that said “your presence brings me happiness”.

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The question is posed. There it floats, slowly evaporating in the center of the room. The question offers a truth, truth about what is alive within the questioner, thoughts driving the questioner’s emotions and animating her to speak. The question seems to suggest absurdity, to suggest that the current topic is unworthy of further examination. There we are, the four of us: me, the questioner, others listening, and the question.

The opportunity is fleeting. Will I react to feelings stimulated from the question? Will I focus solely on the question, on its challenge to my current story? Will I forget the questioner, myself, and the others? Will I miss this opportunity to acknowledge thoughts and feelings actuated by the foreign element, the question, suddenly entering the room?

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Seven of us are gathering around the table. Each of us is bringing considerable skills, each of us is ill prepared for our mutual task, and together our weaknesses are amplified. Crippled by our educational training, from marinating in competitive institutions, years subsumed in a world forged from zero-sum narratives, we sense the burden of our opportunity. It’s another opportunity for co-creation. It’s an opportunity to form community around a shared story, to choose existence over essence. We’ve learned to feign cooperation, to apply our collegial script as an anodyne for our shame, shame felt when passing life serving opportunities, “shame on our need for validation”, shame on our need for the credit we’ve been taught is the currency of survival.

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Wonder was sitting among his lily pad cluster, snatching the occasional mosquito, and surfing his breaking thought waves. After freshly graduating, cum laude, from the Advanced Frog Academy, with citations in oral-marksmanship, long hopping, and deep croaking, Wonder was both excited and disturbed about his future prospects?  Meanwhile, Ponder was sunning on a nearby lily pad.

My wife and I have a pair of stuffed frogs. We’ve named them Ponder and Wonder. I like to fashion Ponder and Wonder narratives that capture and reflect patterns of my storying mind. When I let go into these naively rendered thought streams, I disclose myself, to myself, with gentleness, humor and humility.

[There they are, in the picture: Wonder on the left, and Ponder on the right. Ponder wants you to see that he’s slightly plumper than Wonder.]

Let’s listen as Wonder prepares to story their future.

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Sometimes our stories are so attractive, or so seductive, that we resist amending them in the face of contravening experience. This little story is embarrassingly close to how our minds often work:

A mischievous motorcyclist is cruising along a back highway, on a dark night, when he sees two lights in the oncoming lane. The two lights are far apart.  The cyclist recognizes these lights as two side-by-side motorcyclists riding toward him, and gets an idea. He decides to pop into their lane at the last moment, pass between them, and give them a good fright.

As it turns out, the separated lights are headlights on an unusually wide car. The mischievous cyclist crashes and rolls over the top of the car. The cyclist wakes up in the hospital and says to the nurse: “those guys must’a been holdin hands”.