Story…Our Aging Superpower
Human beings are the only species that loves or hates, welcomes or rejects, determines good or evil, even goes to war or makes peace based on the power of story alone. When story comes into the room, an alchemical reaction occurs that is unique to our kind. We are swayed by the word, especially swayed by story.
From the first guttural utterances of early Homo Sapiens, we are a species that specializes in language. Humanity is currently speaking in 7400 tongues, and the core of every one of these languages is narrative. Words are how we think; stories are how we link. Story is both enemy and ally, a power, once unleashed, that takes on a life of its own.
The misuse of story has ruptured the social fabric of our country, dividing families and communities. But story is a power that resides in every one of us. This is a time when sages who want to contribute to the betterment of life around us, must grab hold of story like a lightning bolt and use it as our aging superpower.
Once upon a time, people like us, grandparents, aunts and uncles, elders in the tribe or village, sat around the evening fires and served as the teaching voices of lineage. We spoke creation tales of who made the world and how we got here. We told illustrative stories that illustrated honor, valor, compassion. We recited cautionary tales of consequences when someone broke the moral code. We raised generations of children within these circles of storytelling and showed them their place in the social order. Our voices lived in their minds all their lives, until one day they took their seats at the fire and became the elders of story.
At my 60th high school reunion, fifty aging peaceniks and veterans representing the political and religious spectrum, gathered in a circle around the question: “What is the essence of who you are now that you’d like us to know?” Two themes emerged: a sense of profound gratitude to have been raised in the world that was, and huge concern for our grandchildren in the world that is. I closed the circle, saying, “We are the first year of the biggest generation in history.” We have had huge collective impact—for good and not so good. Our grandchildren need us to tell them stories that inform, inspire, and activate. Young adults need a sense of continuum. These generations are headed into territories we can barely imagine, but we are the rock they push off from.”
We live in a storyfield influenced (some would say overtaken) by an electronic environment of narrative debris. On our phones and other devices, scrollers are seduced into endless story snippets of cat videos, school shootings, health tips, disaster pleas, war scenes, and cake recipes jumbled together and presented as though of equal significance. The brain goes into overwhelm and gives up its discernment capacities and ability to track. But we grew up before all this. In this manic storyfield, we can offer places of calm, moments of focus, listening, curiosity, and anecdote.
The young need us to provide context and continuity through the art of story. Story is the core of language because it has arc: beginning/middle/end. Story satisfies our imagination and need for insight. Story creates belonging. Story creates a collective view of reality. We are storycatchers. Storycatching means to: Connect with one another. Question with curiosity. Listen without interruption. Reassure and reciprocate.
The remedy for distortion is restoration. The overwhelming story is healed by intentional restorying. Our role as sage-ing elders is to amplify and repeat stories of integrity, fidelity, clarity, empathy, and connection. Our role is to recreate the “evening fires.”
At age eighty-six, my father drove from Maryland to Washington state to live down the road from me for the last twelve years of his life. In the little town of Langley, he became a walking conversation starter. In his pocket he carried a tiny notebook of corny jokes, inspiring quotes, and questions to ask passersby.
Walking those same streets, I carry on my father’s conversational tradition by asking: What delighted you today? When have you thought—I’m just the right person to be here? What little gestures of kindness do you notice? What is surprising you? How are you, really? The stories that emerge from such questions make neuropathways to insight and changed behavior. They shift the social field by eliciting commonality. This is our peace work. It’s not so much fact-checking as heart-checking.
Years ago, when my friend Harriet turned 80, she wanted to collect stories of her life but felt overwhelmed by her decades. Sitting in a coffee shop, I doodled a five-pointed star on a paper placemat in front of us and suggested she identify five turning points in her life and start with those stories. Harriet began writing, and soon after I began teaching entire seminars based on turning point stories. Now named The Story STARter, the diagram and easy writing prompts offer us a way to see the linkage in our life choices.
I’ve used this exercise in journal writing and memoir classes, but also to help groups of people understand “how we got here. What happened to us, what choices did we make or did life thrust upon us that we find ourselves in the situation of now? This exercise works from the personal to the societal. In all the political analysis, the pontificating, opinionating, justifying, what I find most helpful is eliciting story. And what helps me listen to others who are living a different view is their stories. Once upon a time… start there. Write in third person. Write as a fable, a fairy tale, a pilgrimage of discovery.
When I showed the STARter exercise to my father, it elicited memories of his Montana childhood during the Depression, his experiences in World War II, the struggle for right livelihood after. As I turned 70, I ran those stories through my own elder heart and spent the next eight years writing a novel of the home front in the early 1940s. My father consulted on the manuscript until a month before his death at 98. The Beekeeper’s Question: Love and Honey, War and Reckoning, a Novel of WWII, is our legacy turned into fiction.
Transforming this legacy into story was a monumental endeavor. It began with the STAR, with conversations about what has meaning in the parallel and different trajectories of our lives. In the novel, there are three elders, young couples torn by war, a community fractured by issues of social injustice, differing views of the world… just like today. It is my greatest hope that by going back in time, the story will help us navigate this time. The STARter can help many of us do this—not to write a novel—but to be intentional, thoughtful, and prepared to share stories that transmit lineage, moral code, family history, complexities of place, diaspora, immigration, race, and ethnicity.
The world we stand in comes from the history we stand in. History is what scholars say happened; story is what it’s like to live on the ground. We have covered a lot of ground. We are elders. Our years give us perspective and experience, and we have an essential role to offer as storycatchers and storytellers committed to peace- making, reconciliation, and community repair.
It’s our role to light the evening fire—put candles around a table—and hold what is good about humanity up to the light so that we remember who we really are and shine a path for the generations who step beyond us.
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