“If you think you are too small to make an impact, try spending the night in a room with a mosquito” – African proverb
Human knowledge requires narratives that make sense of the world. Sometimes these stories are codified in religious texts, other times, they are scientific hypothesis. Such stories are helpful in daily life too: If you want to remember whether you left your keys on the bureau, odds are you’ll look at that story in your head that includes the bureau, before you walk back to check whether the keys are there. The story is not tangible, like the bureau, but it’s a tremendous time saver, if nothing else.
TED talker, George Monbiot, makes the case that stories are what guide even large social movements, and he has a point.
Eastern religions, particularly Buddhism, make much of achieving “enlightenment,” and at least part of that enlightenment is realizing that a multiplicity of explanations reveal meaning in the world. If you realize “it’s just a story” (roughly like recognizing “it’s just a movie” at a horror flick) you will likely lighten up…perhaps achieving at least one kind of enlightenment.
Your assignment is to remember some story that was significant in your life, then come up with an alternative ending or two. Here are some examples:
1. One evening, a friend found Mullah Nasruddin on his hands and knees under a streetlight. “What are you doing?” asked the friend. “Searching for my key,” replied Nasruddin. The friend started helping, but after a few minutes asked “Where were you standing when you dropped the key?” Nasruddin said “back in the alley over there.” “Then why are you searching here?” asked the friend. “The light is better,” said Nasruddin.
That’s a joke. What if the ending was the friend saying: “Let me get a flashlight and I’ll help you look in the alley.”? Not nearly as funny, and it omits the point the joke makes about human nature...but odds are Nasruddin finds the key.
Here’s another one:
2. The emperor is parading, and a child says “Hey! He’s naked!” In the conventional, Hans Christian Anderson tale, the emperor “grimly continued the parade.”
What if he said “Thanks little child! How silly of me! I’ll go home and get dressed!” The original narrative makes a point about human ego, but the alternative would be the sensible thing to do.
For more about this, recommended reading is Eric Berne’s What Do You Say After You Say Hello?... a book that describes life scripts. Berne asks what would happen if the actors in Hamlet departed from that script and started playing Abie’s Irish Rose. It would be worse theater, but a happier life for the characters.
For those of you with Netflix, take a look at Adam Ruins Everything for some idea of how corrected stories would influence our daily lives.
Another story: Everyone knows the game Monopoly. That’s a game that has one winner, and everyone else gets bankrupt. There’s an alternative version (Prosperity) from the woman who invented the game. In that second version, everyone stops playing when everyone wins. You can Google for the alternative rules.
Bonus Stories:
Climate catastrophe could be the end of humanity...or it could be the two-by-four that whacks us on the head and wakes us up to end a lot of unsustainable practices. (Political Economist Mark Blyth actually suggests this. He says the tipping point will occur with some disaster: e.g. Miami loses drinking water.)
Donald Trump is an embarrassment, but he’s not doing much different than lots of previous presidents (“Hey, Hey, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?” was a chant from my youth). He’s uncouth, but maybe he could be the two-by-four…
...Your turn!
Human knowledge requires narratives that make sense of the world. Sometimes these stories are codified in religious texts, other times, they are scientific hypothesis. Such stories are helpful in daily life too: If you want to remember whether you left your keys on the bureau, odds are you’ll look at that story in your head that includes the bureau, before you walk back to check whether the keys are there. The story is not tangible, like the bureau, but it’s a tremendous time saver, if nothing else.
TED talker, George Monbiot, makes the case that stories are what guide even large social movements, and he has a point.
Eastern religions, particularly Buddhism, make much of achieving “enlightenment,” and at least part of that enlightenment is realizing that a multiplicity of explanations reveal meaning in the world. If you realize “it’s just a story” (roughly like recognizing “it’s just a movie” at a horror flick) you will likely lighten up…perhaps achieving at least one kind of enlightenment.
Your assignment is to remember some story that was significant in your life, then come up with an alternative ending or two. Here are some examples:
1. One evening, a friend found Mullah Nasruddin on his hands and knees under a streetlight. “What are you doing?” asked the friend. “Searching for my key,” replied Nasruddin. The friend started helping, but after a few minutes asked “Where were you standing when you dropped the key?” Nasruddin said “back in the alley over there.” “Then why are you searching here?” asked the friend. “The light is better,” said Nasruddin.
That’s a joke. What if the ending was the friend saying: “Let me get a flashlight and I’ll help you look in the alley.”? Not nearly as funny, and it omits the point the joke makes about human nature...but odds are Nasruddin finds the key.
Here’s another one:
2. The emperor is parading, and a child says “Hey! He’s naked!” In the conventional, Hans Christian Anderson tale, the emperor “grimly continued the parade.”
What if he said “Thanks little child! How silly of me! I’ll go home and get dressed!” The original narrative makes a point about human ego, but the alternative would be the sensible thing to do.
For more about this, recommended reading is Eric Berne’s What Do You Say After You Say Hello?... a book that describes life scripts. Berne asks what would happen if the actors in Hamlet departed from that script and started playing Abie’s Irish Rose. It would be worse theater, but a happier life for the characters.
For those of you with Netflix, take a look at Adam Ruins Everything for some idea of how corrected stories would influence our daily lives.
Another story: Everyone knows the game Monopoly. That’s a game that has one winner, and everyone else gets bankrupt. There’s an alternative version (Prosperity) from the woman who invented the game. In that second version, everyone stops playing when everyone wins. You can Google for the alternative rules.
Bonus Stories:
Climate catastrophe could be the end of humanity...or it could be the two-by-four that whacks us on the head and wakes us up to end a lot of unsustainable practices. (Political Economist Mark Blyth actually suggests this. He says the tipping point will occur with some disaster: e.g. Miami loses drinking water.)
Donald Trump is an embarrassment, but he’s not doing much different than lots of previous presidents (“Hey, Hey, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?” was a chant from my youth). He’s uncouth, but maybe he could be the two-by-four…
...Your turn!
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