Story saves the world

Regeneration to me comes through story. Understanding social change only as protests and rallies and lobbying transforms the work into an endless labor. Social impact is more than a sterile project or a sequence of events, and understanding it in that way ignores the relationships embedded in the work. Storytelling is what brings life and people and relationships into how we understand social impact. This world is volatile and unpredictable. People wake up to existence, coming to consciousness at different ages and in different contexts. We wake up and look to one another to understand how the world became as it is. There’s something deeply isolating about waking up to a world that hasn’t nurtured you, hasn’t claimed you. Our humanness craves story and stories represent our first attempts to locate ourselves in that volatile world. They’re how we come to understand ourselves and why we’re here and what we ought to do.

For the individual, participating in story, by hearing or telling, is an attempt at human portraiture, documenting the patterns and tendencies of human thought. Story is a way for people to shave off pieces of themselves, immortalizing their experiences, history, and perspective, enabling the common individual to contribute to the intellectual history of humanity, offering their own perspective up as a piece of the puzzle that is life and existence. All story is the authors’ donation to the lifeblood of humanity. It is how we reach out, extending ourselves both to others and even to ourselves, through ourselves and toward ourselves.

More than this though, stories are communal. As a cartographer marks their steps by sketching out a map, so too does a community track their existence by telling a story. Story is how we share ourselves with one another. For a community or a culture, story is about sense-making, forming the foundation for how groups see the whole of the world. A story is a shared personhood. An interdividuality. It is what unites humanity, forming a network of shared interpretation; a social space where dialogue and communal growth can occur.

Understanding it like this, this work is necessarily a communal act. Our willingness to work together towards something we’re not certain can ever truly be achieved is our participation in a common substance. It’s how we preserve our humanity and nurture it.

Oppression happens when these stories we tell ourselves fragment, and suddenly somebody’s perspective begins to dominate and eventually drown out everyone else’s. What we do when we work towards a common future is reweave those broken fragments back into a common story that cares for and represents us all. Stories engender compassion and compassion saves the world. Creating a new, communal, compassionate story is a work that is necessarily recuperative, and regenerative. It is a re-creation of the world.

From this perspective, storytelling and storyreceiving, then, become essential manifestations of that fundamentally human quality of persistence in the face of impossibility. Telling to be understood and listening to understand testifies of the fundamentally human quality that unites all organizing: the drive and hope that pushes us to find each other and seek a common future even in the absurd, heartbreaking face of our fractured present.

Working at the Center has helped me come to understand my role in this, our collective mission: to gather stories. Story is the soul behind the mechanical movement of showing up. It’s what makes our participation in the work meaningful and continuous. It’s what’s going to keep the work moving when it feels like there’s nothing left. Storytelling is a fundamentally creative act in the face of a destructive reality. It’s how we reach for one another, and absurdly, impossibly find someone else reaching back. It is, fundamentally, an act of faith and hope.