The Story You Tell Yourself
It’s your captivity and the gateway to your freedom.
I work with people’s stories for a living. So let me tell you about my time travel device: a one-of-a-kind knife.
When I visit my home country, Croatia, every summer, I am mesmerized by the sea, sun, and, most of all, the kitchen. We usually stay at my sister’s house on the Adriatic coast, and our Summer life revolves around the kitchen table and one particular blade.
A long time ago, about the same time I had my first elementary school crush, I remember holding a new chef’s knife. It was Saturday morning. I lifted it from a cutting board where my dad placed it, praising its craftsmanship.
You might have heard about or used a Wüsthof knife, the brand owned by the seventh generation of the Wüsthof family since 1814. They come from Solingen, Germany, known for centuries as the “City of Blades.” My dad called this knife simply “The Solingen.”
It was brand new then. Here’s how that very same knife looks today, 50 years later, in the silence of my kitchen table in New York City.
If you enlarge this photo and look more closely, you can see the time passing. About half of the blade has been used up. The wood handle cleaves apart while somehow still staying together. There are thousands of little scratches on it, marking the past.
This past summer, I made a request to my sister Bisera, asking for permission to take it to New York City with me. I expected she’d say, “Of course! It has been here for a long time, ever since mom and dad passed away. It’s your turn to have it!” Instead, to my surprise, she got reluctant. She told me her family was going to think about it.
Up to that moment, we have never talked about the value of this knife. It’s just been there. For almost half a century, every Summer, every day, every meal, connecting us, time, and the world. Now, we all realize we have this holy tool in our hands. It took them two days to hand it to me, still reluctant.
Which made me remember the power of my life’s story to shape my life and yours to shape your.
We forget. Sometimes it’s the sheer number of stories fighting for our attention. Sometimes it’s our practice of being in the present moment that makes us neglect how real the past and the future are (more about that in TNG soon).
Sometimes, the story that occupies us at any given time is just too small for us to live.
The story is one of the two primary and complementary psychic ways of being alive. The Eastern spiritual tradition champions presence. The Western spiritual tradition champions the story. Which reflects our human neural makeup. Our brain works like a toggle. At any given moment, you are either present or entangled in a story.
As humans, we survive and thrive by updating and repairing our personal stories. We say, “I went through a life change, and now my story goes like this.” By changing our story, we can even change our past. Not to mention the future. As Bruce Feiler reminds us, there are no imperatives of consistency or even accuracy. We are allowed to change our own stories at any time, for any reason, even if it is only to make ourselves feel better.
And to change our stories, we must! Every season we are new and newly alive. Our life stories broaden (include more of the unknown around us) and deepen (include more of the unknown within us). We step over the line of our identity towards “the other,” change, and harvest our life by retelling our story.
Like “The Solingen,” our life story is our inheritance (the larger story we find ourselves in), the choices we make or want to make, the expression of our true love, and the result of experiences beyond our control, like magical words, songs, meals, waters, and fires that come our way. Our life story is the sum of what we notice.
What story are you telling? Do you need to stop telling the story you have been telling yourself? Does your story need repair? Do you need to tell a bigger one? A truer one?
Above all, be alone with it all,
a hiving off, a corner of silence
amidst the noise, refuse to talk,
even to yourself, and stay in this place
until the current of the story
is strong enough to float you out.
(David Whyte, from poem Coleman’s Bed)
In the middle of all the grand stories served to us by forces larger than our single lives, let’s lavish ourselves, every once in a while, with a period of silence from which we can notice what’s happening and let the new story announce itself to us.
It’s remarkable, isn’t it?
The story we tell ourselves is both our captivity and the gateway to our freedom.