Stories Can Contain the Ancient Wisdom of Our Peoples
I’ve always been fascinated by stories.
When I was a little boy, over breakfast, I would sit by a cassette player at a table, eating my cereal and listening to a story tape (we’d now call them audiobooks, of course).
As an adolescent, the stories told in the books I read shaped my sense of how to live life, inviting questions of good and evil, right and wrong… and the shades of grey in between.
As a young man, I remember realising that I could stay up as late as I wanted reading, because why should I stop myself doing something so thrilling because of a lecture the next day?
As a slightly older man, I turned to stories in the most difficult times. They returned me to myself, and helped me to sleep.
This insight, seeing how the stories could return me to myself in my early 20s changed things for me. It was an insight I have carried with me since. Not all stories do it, but some can.
These days, in difficult times, I sometimes have to consciously switch, finding the stories that do that.
It feels like a thirst that needs to be quenched.
Reading a story that doesn’t do that for me, or doesn’t do it in the same way… that feels like trying to squeeze water from a stone.
I know what I need, but I can’t get it.
And then a different author, or a different book, and suddenly things are different. Thirst quenched, life easier to live.
That invites the question: what is different about those other stories?
And one part of that, at least, is this:
Stories can contain the ancient wisdom of our peoples.
That, in fact, is likely how wisdom was passed down from generation to generation in the era before writing.
Like our memories, these stories aren’t truth (even if they sometimes seem like it).
Instead, like our memories, they are a mechanism by which we can hold wisdom across time, passing on what is necessary to survive, to live, to accept and invite life.
Not all stories do this.
I can see it with the children’s books I read to my daughter.
Some of them feel like something.
Some of them don’t.
Now that I know what to look for, I can sometimes sense the echoes of ancient stories in children’s books, as Stickman returns home or Tabby McTat tells his wife and his son, ‘There’s something that has to be done’.
Sometimes I notice it because those moments bring tears to my eyes and choke my words.
Sensing the deep, historic necessity of these moments.
And so we should be careful to notice the ancient truths available to us, especially in stories that have survived centuries or even millennia. There’s something for us in Shakespeare, Homer, The Bible and more.
These stories mean something.
One of the most famous historic structures, present in so many stories, is the one Joseph Campbell identified: the hero’s journey. The arc of what it takes to change and grow.
We need to know that, to feel it, especially in the moments when we have to go into the cave to fight the dragon, or return to the Shire even though everything has changed for us.
We can, I think, also identify things which carry a deep truth. Insights we might have that could have - if they haven’t already - been a part of an ancient story, one that might bring tears to our eyes or choke the words in our throats.
I saw one, recently.
I imagined two doors, next to each other.
Grand doors, intricate, horse-shoe shaped.
One is the door through which souls on their way to the world emerge, as the baby they are going to inhabit grows and is born.
Another is the door through which our souls exit this world, as our lives come to an end.
And the doors could stand next to each other, so that two souls, one going one way, one going the other, might catch each other’s eyes.
Share a few words.
As one leaves this world and one arrives.
If a scene could have been part of Homer or Beowulf, if a scene opens your heart and returns you to your experience of life…
If a story returns you to yourself from the tearing and stretching of the world.
Then maybe there is a deep truth in it.
The kind that might be worth considering, adding to your sense of how the world works.
The kind that might pass down the generations.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
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