Telling A Story

 

Sometime we feel driven to tell a story. We know we are magicians, but our tricks are with words. We use sleight of words instead of sleight of hand to present the images to our clients. Something may have happened in our past. It can lie there for years, for decades. It can float to the surface of our minds and capture us. Then we may be driven to explore the impact, the intent. It worries at us until we find a way to absorb it into our capacity to express it.

We may not want the world to know the real story. There may be all sorts of entanglements with our present that we may not want to confront. But the lesson of the past experience may drive us to allow it to find expression in a form we can accept.

We can leave hints in the tale we weave, just for the fun of it-to see if the determined, the curious, the conspiracy theorists, can follow the tortuous trail we blaze through the thickets of our minds. They are mysterious, jagged zig-zags of electricity-nano-energies-trickling between cellular protuberances, random variances in the landscapes, the minute geography of the material between our ears.

The truth is we ourselves don’t know where we are headed. All we know is that we are on a journey we have begun. Somewhere down the road our trail will come to end. If it is interesting, we extend the trip. If it is boring, or we tire, we bring it to an abrupt end. But, who knows, we may come this way again.

The story may not end here-we may come by to repair and mend. Indeed we are always mending. Sometimes the ultimate follows a much different trail from the path we originally forged. We are the masters here –we call the shots. And we are dictators-we answer to ourselves alone. No explanations.

The wonder of it is that some of us need that blank page so we can have room to elaborate our imaginations. No matter what is happening in our lives, it may be the most pedestrian, some of us need a space where we can imagine the unimaginable. Sometimes we come here with an idea, but often we come with just the thought we have something in our gut that we want to express. It is amorphous. It may be just indigestion, but soon enough it finds expression on that blank electronic page. Can it be worthwhile, nevertheless? The reader will ultimately judge.

Sometimes we worry at it like a dog with a bone-somehow we are dissatisfied. We tweak this, we tweak that. If it gets better, we let it rest awhile. Sometimes-rarely, we are too much in love with our own words-we scrap it all and start over.

Isn’t this our terra incognita, the place where we can free ourselves from all of life’s impedimenta. Here we are the free spirits of our imagination. We can be like we were as teen-agers, with all that unknown territory stretching before us. This is the world of our imaginings that we can construct with all the wisdom we have gathered but with only the inhibitions we choose to clothe ourselves with. Free, free at last, but only to the point we allow.

We seek complexity out of simplicity. We seek the simple redolent with meaning, intimating other layers of thought that may escape the idle glance, demanding attention and contemplation to distill essences present in minute quantity. But rich, brimming with meaning . Occasionally one would come across a small knot of an idea in the mixture, a small nugget of gold among all the dross. I fantasize there are such nuggets available to us in our musings, that they are worth pursuing. Some may be worthwhile sharing.

Are you a listener, a reader, or do you have something to say, a story to tell?

Whatcha think?