The Stories of Our Lives

Last night Tom and I had dinner with a good friend. Bruce is someone I feel very fortunate to call friend, and client, at the same time. Our dinner was just a casual event - something to keep the friendship bond strong. Bruce is the husband of Maxine.

While eating our dinner, our conversation moved into the human condition - something often discussed in creative writing classes. Back in the day, studying literature at Brockport, we beat the idea of writing about the "human condition" to death, I think. In the end, what...pray tell...is "the human condition?"

For me, and for the conversation last night with Bruce, it's about stories. It's about sharing the intimate  stories of our lives. Intimate, you'll remember, does not have to be seductive. It can merely be the feelings one has with close, personal relationships -- including friendships, family, or colleagues. When we human beings share our stories, when we let down our guard, reveal the secrets hidden in the closets of our past, when we allow the listener inside, we are often merely sharing the details of what makes us who we are.

I think those intimate details include historical perspective - a looking back on who we were. Not someone's sister or daughter or cousin, but the person inside, who has memories that stretch beyond last year, or last month, to the collective whole -- before time began. We guard that bundle of memories so tightly -- it can be hard to figure out who we are, today.

In my youth, I remember long summer days running barefoot about the neighborhood with friends, always outdoors, always shouting and calling across lush, green backyards, always intent upon being young and free. We didn't know it then, but those were the days, and they are gone forever, now.

They are part of the historical past - not something you read about in history books, or even in novels. They're stories flowing in scripted handwriting on old paper; letters to a lover, a sister, a friend. They're glimpses into a world of simplicity -- where children were children, and allowed to be so. Where parents didn't strive to find things for the children to do -- the children invented their play.

They gathered in backyards and build forts. They dragged refrigerator boxes around the neighborhood and used tape and old branches, disgarded rags and toys, bed sheets stolen from their twin beds, to create that special place only their best friends were admitted...for lunches of PB&J...and maybe cookies. The boys played cowboys and Indians (not PC today!), and the girls played house (still PC today... hmmmm)

There are more stories than just those. There are stories of high school dances, sock hops, meeting for lunch off of school grounds, skipping class and not getting caught. There are stories first kisses, stolen behind the bleachers during cold, autumn football games or at drive-ins, those lost relicts of the Dick and Jane world of our youth. Stories of lost loves, stolen by best friends, or invaders from other neighborhoods. There are stories of freedom in going off to college...so far away from home.

The stories are individual, and collective. They are stories of life and of people and of men and women, and of our hopes and dreams. Stories of many worlds - because each of us, in our imagination, lived in different realms. We fashioned our lives out of the stories we chose to embrace and believe.

These are the stories you could be helping women tell. These are the "days of our lives"... back in a place and time that is so distant, it could be centuries ago.

Will you ask the women you market to, to share their stories? Will you create a place for them to tell their stories?

You should. Because it's in our nature to share. Isn't who we were, who we wanted to be, who we thought we were, and who we are now (or who we think we are now) passed on from generation to generation, in story? The story of the human condition? 

What's your story? If you don't tell it, who will?

Comments

[Social Network Web Design]

A great post. Reading your post brought me back to my days when I was still a kid. I remember my friends and I also had that refrigerator box thing. This post definitely brought back lots of memories.