I’ve talked about how it seems like real life is not like a story, and it doesn’t follow the rules of the story, and it doesn’t necessarily fit into any story.
But I don’t mean to suggest that stories should be completely ignored.
Not at all.
It’s only that there’s no essential story that’s automatically part of anything that we do.
But we can add as a layer.
Stories are an extra layer that we can add on top of anything we do.
And at that, they are amazing.
It’s amazing how we can change the entire feeling of what we’re doing simply by changing the story that we attach to it, the interpretation that we give to it.
So as long as I keep that caveat that no story is automatically built in, and I can always change the story that I attach to anything, now there’s a whole playground, a whole world of stories that we can imagine to give a layer of interpretation on top of all the everyday things we do.
Now, when we’re doing things that are completely absorbing and engaging, that just make us feel alive in the very moment, well, maybe we don’t even need any story at all.
We can keep it simple, just live in the present, and experience the present, be alive in that moment.
We don’t need any story.
But for all the times that we are doing things that are less than fully engaging, things that could be boring even, things that don’t give us that feeling of life while doing them, automatically, then it seems like by applying the right stories to them, we can really make them a part of this overall life story, and we can make them bring out that feeling of really being engaging and worth living for.
Bring out that aliveness feeling.
A story really can do that.
So I’m thinking about everyday mundane working.
I imagine like office-style working.
And, you know, I can picture it like this kind of image of the office drone.
And so I just imagine like faceless grey suit, walking, you know, going to rush hour with, you know, with the briefcase.
However you want a picture it.
It kind of, you know, it’s an old trope.
But you know, just like the machine in the factory.
You’re just like a cog in the machine.
You’re going to work.
You punch the time clock.
You are in this sterile office environment with the grey carpet and the grey drop ceiling, and looking at that clock on the wall slowly tick by the day and your life, and get a break for lunch, and then you’re back again, and then “Oh, it’s 5:00” or whatever, and then you punch out, and you get back in the rush-hour traffic, and then you find yourself back home, worn out at the end of the day, with just enough time to have dinner, get ready for bed, and then ready to do it again.
And, you know, if you kind of put this kind of story over it and this kind of picture, you really can imagine this as just a never-ending prison sentence […] You basically just do this every day, and you have no choice, and there’s a feeling of not leading anywhere.
It doesn’t go anywhere, and it’s just going to be this over and over again forever.
And this is your story.
This is you.
You are an office drone.
Well, it seems like with that kind of story, it could really make any kind of work feel pretty dismal.
I mean, even work that’s a little bit fun could get pretty ugly when we think of it this way.
And it seems like it’s easy to fall into that kind of story if we’re doing a job that we don’t feel particularly excited about.
But then on the other hand, we could take the same kind of boring office job, but imagine a different story.
And maybe it’ll be different for everybody, whatever can be engaging for you, but I like to imagine being an explorer, you know, that I’m in the office preparing the next adventure, preparing the next expedition.
And so it seems like, you know, it’s an everyday boring office and you know I’m going through the rush hour and going through all the routines just like a cog in the machine, but I’m going into that office, that same grey drab office, and that is my office where I am preparing my next adventure.
I’m preparing my next expedition.
And even if I’m not actually doing anything related to like planning some kind of voyage or anything, maybe I’m just doing routine work in order to raise money.
That seems to be one of the biggest headaches of, you know, any expedition is simply raising the funds for the expedition.
So imagine taking everyday boring work and imagining it as “I am laying the foundation for my next adventure.
I’m preparing the expedition.” So, you know, it takes a little bit of a stretch of the imagination, but I guess that’s what storytelling’s all about.
We could take exactly the same situation, and we could have the drone storyline or we could have the adventure storyline.
And it seems like we really have the power to be able to choose our own stories and apply them to anything we do.
All it takes is maybe a little leap of the imagination.
#changethestory #differentstory #anotherstory