My bride and I were on a walk the other day, and a woman and her a friend walked by, talking. One of them said to the other: “So I guess I am going to have to tell them my life story.” That really struck me for a couple of reasons. One, we say so many things in any given day that really shine a light on how things actually are but we barely notice, and two, how much meaning her statement had.
We say that line as such a throw away, don’t we. ‘You really want to hear my life story?,’ ‘He/She tells everyone her life story,’ or even better, ‘Story of my life.’ Let’s look at this with a little more depth. When we talk about our life story, on a certain level we recognize that our life is just that, a story. But only to a certain degree, where it’s still safe. Safe for the ego/story, safe for it to maintain the illusion that we are, in fact, the story. We never stop to see how much deeper than that safe degree we could go with that simple, but very powerful and accurate statement.
When we entertain the possibility that our life is a story, then immediately we have to wonder about who is doing the telling of it. That’s easy enough, it’s me. And then we feel that we might overwhelm or bother people by telling our life story, so we keep it short and simple, and move on. Too bad. Next time we sigh to ourselves “Story of my life…” (usually when something bad happens), stop and look at that. It is truly the story of our life. It’s a story we not only tell ourselves, but the story we continually craft and create. All the time. Incessantly. And most of all, unconsciously. That is the important piece. And because we do this unconsciously, our story continues on, seemingly without our participation or input.
But what if we woke up to the simple fact that we indeed write, craft and create our stories? What if we realized that this ‘story of our life’ was not happening to us but by us? It’s a game changer, let me tell you. Suddenly we become aware of how much we tell ourselves on any given day. How many ‘mini stories’ we have going all the time. ‘I am a loser, a winner, the best, the worst, the mediocre, will never amount to anything, am the greatest person alive, other people suck, it’s my parents fault, my fault, his fault, no ones fault, God’s fault, why me, why not me?’ and on and on and on… Once we notice this, we can either stay with that growing awareness, or go right back to being a victim to our own story.
If we choose to take the matter of our story into our own creative hands, the jig is up on the illusion. The illusion that things and life happen to us, because all we are is our story. Instead we discover quickly, that life is a creative endeavor of choice. To choose anything. Nothing limits our freedom of choice, short of physics and our own minds. The magnitude of this escapes us at first, but when we begin to understand and own this simple fact of our choosing everything, everything actually changes. If we even consider the above to be true, then some questions come to mind: Why would we choose to create miserable stories? Why would we choose to believe them to be us? Why would we choose to continue on in the same manner? The beautiful point is that we can choose not to. And when we start to notice the incessant ‘story telling’ in our minds and begin to see it for what it is, we begin to get less and less interested in these ramblings until we stop feeding them altogether and become something very wonderful: present.
It’s our choice. Again and again.
Cheers,
Ralf