Is the universe a friendly place?
Albert Einstein thought that this was the most important question facing humanity.
Is the universe a friendly place?
The answer is different for all, but it arises from the same place. What we think of existence – is it good or bad, right or wrong? – is directly correlated to the stories we have heard, lived, and written on the stone tablets of our mind. Human brains are biologically designed to organize information by image and narrative. It is through story that humans make sense of their world.
In fact, the ability to tell, hear, write, and understand stories is a distinctly human endeavor. Sapiens share approximately 99 percent of our DNA with simians; basically, we are still apes on a cellular level. Storytelling is where we differ. You could never change a monkey’s behavior simply by promising him limitless bananas after death in some imagined monkey heaven.
Story, as it turns out, has been crucial to our evolution, maybe even more than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs allowed us to hang on, but stories told us what to hang on to.
But how to tell a riveting story in our current attention economy? How does a story hold our focus when our brain is being ever trained toward distraction? When we can get the same dopamine rush from a 15 second tiktok video, is it worth our time and energy to listen to personal stories that are almost ten minutes long? If we believe that our attention is a scarce and valuable resource, couldn’t our time be better spent?
I believe that it isn’t just that we hear and tell stories. The type of stories we hear and tell matter greatly. We need to hear stories where evil is vanquished, where someone encounters great misfortune but grows wiser for it. We need stories that break our heart and then sew it back together. We need stories that awaken us to the wondrous and beautiful and brutal world we live in. Good stories help us cope in an ever changing world that often seems to be spinning out of control. As Neil Gaiman so expertly summarized it, “Fairytales don’t tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairytales tell children that dragons can be killed.”
We need to be reminded, over and over, that no matter how hard our life is, there is always hope that things will get better. Think of it like this: If humans don’t get enough healthy iodine in our bodies, we absorb radioactive iodine that our grown foods absorb from the atmosphere after nuclear test explosions. Yikes.
I believe stories work in the same fashion. If we don’t fill ourselves up with stories of grace, humor, gratitude, empathy, curiosity, and hope, we’re more susceptible to sopping up more poisonous narratives. So the answer to is the universe a friendly place? is shaped and colored by the narratives we choose to consume and hold as true.
Please join us at Leeds Center for the Arts on Friday, October 21 at 7:30 pm for The Voices of Winchester: A Night of Storytelling, featuring local storytellers (like me!), artists, and musicians sharing just such tales. This is a free event and food will be provided. See you there!
