Stories

"We tell stories to try to come to terms with the world, to harmonize our lives with reality... Myths are stories of our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. We all need to tell our story and to understand our story. We all need to understand death and to cope with death, and we all need help in our passages from birth to life and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are."  

-Bill Moyers

To me, this quotation is much deeper and goes further into the human psyche than even I would have imagined. Since I was a little kid, the thrill of hearing a story, in any form, was the most exhilarating thing that happened to me on a regular basis. My childhood in particular provided me with many chances to hear stories, and I seized every opportunity I could get. Being a student of the Monadnock Waldorf School, story-telling was nothing less than a daily occurrence. Each and every day, during main lesson, the teacher told a story of some kind. Some were about animals, some people, and some were directly taken from things like the Bible and other religious documents. These stories captivated me in a way that never would have been possible with a TV show or movie.

Each and every time I heard a new story, I tried to walk in the hero of the tale’s shoes. I was Moses talking to the burning bush. I was Robin Hood, saving the poor and being jocund with my merry men. I was every animal from a bear to a fish, and I enjoyed every second of it. However, as I continued to slip seamlessly into more and more hero’s shoes, I began to notice a pattern. I layman’s terms, more specifically Bill Moyer’s terms, all of the stories loosely follow the pattern described in this quotation. Each time a hero is faced with a challenge that shifts everything that he or she knows about the world, the the challenge is overcome throughout the rest of the story, and in the end, wisdom is gained.

Eventually, I began to explain this with the Freshman English plot diagram. I thought: “Oh that’s just what a story is.” That view stuck with me through most of High School because, truthfully, I never really thought it needed  more explaining. But after discussions of the hero’s journey and much of the literature that I have read in this class, the plot diagram is now just one of many aspects that shroud a story with its unknown aura of interest. Now when I look at a story, I don’t just see myself walking in the character’s situation, I become the character with a small part of myself. I use my experiences and knowledge to try and understand the feelings and thoughts of a character so full of these precious emotions someone felt it was important that his or her story be written down to be told again.