Life Stories

Has it ever occurred to you how many stories float around you in your daily life? I considered this peculiar phenomenon this past week while at work. I am a daycare technician in an elementary school; I have several staff members who work for me at lunchtime and in our after-school daycare. While I enjoy my job (I am relatively new at it) I do often find it very difficult to maneuver around personalities and events that are left in my hands to deal with. As a manager I am supposed to be able to solve everyone’s issues, whatever they may be.

While pondering the responsibility of said issues, I realized that I could only do so much. It dawned on me how complex and chaotic a workplace really is, and only because everyone has a life story.

That life story plays out on a daily basis in the work place. People are carrying around burdens from the past, present and even the future. Their stories shape who they are just as my stories shape who I am and how I deal with the world around me. Each one of our stories then plays out during our interactions. We are often projecting thoughts and feelings that really have nothing to do with the here and now. They are unconscious hurts and memories that have often gone unresolved over the years and more often than not get played out over and over again in our daily lives.

I know, this sounds like a lot of psychobabble, doesn’t it? And maybe it is but look around you. Take a good look at any given situation you might be in, at home, at school or at work. Each person that you come in contact with undoubtedly has a story hidden deep within. It is what they do with that story that makes them easier or more difficult to deal with. A lot of people aren’t storytellers and so their stories go unheard. What a shame that is, because everyone’s story is a blockbuster. What goes on within us is so important and if our story goes unheard, if our voice is silenced, where does that lead us? It leads us nowhere, exactly the place where you don’t want to go, Nowhere Land. It is a hostile, barren, scary and often lonely place to visit. In Nowhere Land you are left to wallow in those past hurts and pains never to share your story and hence never to heal and move on.

Why do people write? More importantly, why do people read what people write? We read and write so that we can share our stories of life, stories about a new relationship, a friend a lover, a child, a teacher. Each relationship has a story to tell and we the listeners grow from hearing those words of wisdom from an elder, or from the innocence of a child’s outlook on life.

If I took all the stories I have heard over the years from all of the people I have known and continue to meet on this journey I would have volumes of words, chapters and pages of wondrous and often horrific stories. Stories of babies being born, of parents dying: of tragic events unfolding of children dying and people committing suicide, stories of recovery and honesty and hope. Stories filled with joy, and sadness. Stories from both polar opposites. Each of these stories shapes the storyteller and the listener.

So while I contemplate the job at hand I am reminded that yes, there is a job to do, but each person has a story to tell and how he or she does their job depends really on how well they are able to share their story. The universe is a vast and glorious place waiting for us to exhale our stories into the stratosphere. If we can muster up the courage to reveal them, then that dark and lonely place I call Nowhere Land cannot contain us. How well do we know our own stories, the inner demons and angels that lurk in our nowhere land? Hopefully we know them enough to let them go, to reveal our stories in all their horrific and joyous moments.

For me, knowing that people are stories, often untold and hidden, makes it easier for me to deal with them. If I can read a person right, then I know I have understood their story in whatever way they cared to share their version of it. Knowing that people are more than just what they do, they are in their own right a story within a story, which, like an onion exposing its layers, can go on revealing even deeper stories. I too then must keep in mind that managing people is a lot like trying to read War and Peace, its complexity and length appearing to be without limit.

Image Credit

“Subway by Lily Furedi” by ctankcycles. Creative Commons Flickr. Some Rights Reserved

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