Most of our immediate world is unseen, and we’re often blind to our own stories. Our stories extend our senses into our personal understanding. We build stories of the world in our minds and bodies, stories as models, stories as images, and visceral stories captured in our emotional relationships with the world. These intertwined stories comprise our personal story ecosystem.
We work to integrate what we do see into our story ecosystem. Our stories are theories about forces, intentions, thoughts and interactions. They help us to “make sense” of what we see. We test our stories in our lives; our life is our experiment with our storied theories.
Familiarity arises when we believe our story ecosystem is sufficient to “make sense” of our experience, when we believe we understand the important dynamics of our context. When we have familiarity, when we feel comfortable with our understanding, we tend to filter out what doesn’t fit into our stories.
In unfamiliar territory our disorientation is our lack of a storied understanding.
My wife and I were driving along Highway 14, on the Washington State side of the Columbia River Gorge. It was a cold, clear and moonless December night. We were returning after visiting the Oregon Coast for ten days. I was noticing all of the lights: headlights of oncoming cars and trucks, headlights of cars and trucks on the other side of the gorge (on Interstate 84), lights reflecting off the Columbia River, lights in the sky and attached to homes and businesses.
I amused myself, watching my mind story to fill in the unseen: A line of red and white lights moving along the other side of the gorge, it must be a Semi-truck on Interstate 84. That spot in the sky looks like a star, but it’s moving, it must be a satellite.
We rounded a bend into a broad landscape. There was an impressive array of slowly flashing, partially synchronized, red lights. The lights appeared to span tens of miles across our distant dark horizon. They appeared on both sides of the gorge in somewhat randomly placed groupings. I felt confused and intrigued. What is this!? After a few moments, perhaps 15 exhilarating seconds of mystery, I remembered the huge population of new wind turbines we passed ten days earlier on our day trip to the coast. My disorientation passed with a slight disappointment for the lost mystery.
So much of the unseen significantly influences our experience. We can’t see other’s thoughts or intentions. We experience the forces and effects of nature, but we can’t see what’s pulling or pushing. We can’t see the future, or what’s around the corner. Where “seeing” means – to bring into consciousness -, we’re often blind to our own motivations, to our own story ecosystem.
Our stories are real. They’re real even when they’re inaccurate representations of the world. Our stories are as real as the laws of physics because they animate us; they guide our behavior insomuch as physical laws dictate behavior in our natural world. Our stories are the unseen forces behind our individual and collective behavior. When we’re trapped in our stories, when we’re blind to the narratives behind our feelings and behaviors, we’re blown in the wind of our unseen stories, unwitting puppets.
My confusion and discomfort in relationship with the world is my emotional signal for an opportunity to learn. When I reveal my storied relationships to myself, I gain clarity around my experience. A door opens.