We tell stories to talk out the trouble in our lives, trouble otherwise so often so unspeakable. It is one of our main ways of making our lives sensible. Trying to live without stories can make us crazy. They help us recognize what we believe to be most valuable in the world, and help us identify what we hold demonic.
Interpretation
Stories help us make sense of our troubles and beliefs.
William Kittredge's quote emphasizes the significance of storytelling in processing our life's challenges and experiences. By sharing and listening to stories, we find coherence in our struggles, recognize our values, and confront the darker aspects of our lives, suggesting that narratives are essential to not only understand ourselves but also to maintain our sanity amidst chaos.
In practice
In a therapy session, a counselor could use this quote to emphasize the importance of narrative in healing.
It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.
Where there is no conflict, there is no fault.
There's a difference between making incremental improvements and making sweeping changes that take you away from your core values.
The media is an ally when it comes to showing the truth about terrorist groups. Attacking the media will not produce a more compliant citizenry. It will produce a more alienated, suspicious and disenfranchised public, one more likely to chafe under a government's attempts at control, all to the benefit of terrorist groups.
And yet we knew, for a certainty, that when first emissaries of Earth went walking among the planets, Earth's other sons would be dreaming not about such expeditions but about a piece of bread.
The secret of this kind of climbing, is like Zen. Don't think. Just dance along. It's the easiest thing in the world, actually easier than walking on flat ground which is monotonous. The cute little problems present themselves at each step and yet you don't hesitate and you find yourself on some other boulder you picked out for no special reason at all, just like zen.~ Japhy
Like an ethereal presence_x000D_ You hang out everywhere._x000D_ Not a naughty or scary goblin,_x000D_ Rather, an inquisitive observer,_x000D_ A concerned, caring custodian,_x000D_ Visiting every niche and closet_x000D_ Where we stuff the undesired_x000D_ Of our messy, blemished lives,_x000D_ You haunt territories we ignore,_x000D_ Hoping we will find you there.
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