A short article on storytelling

We are far less modern than the average fashionista would like to think. Just like my notions of the fashionista we are driven by the more basic bits of our Neolithic brains, the neurotransmitters that allow us to build stereotypes to simplify our representations of world, to peel back the cacophony of extraneous noise and focus on what’s important. If we didn’t use these filters, basic heuristics and rules of thumb, the world would seem too complex a place to live, every moment overwhelming. Life, however, seems to flow on as one connected whole, even though we, one way or another, live out our minds as a series of closely connected ideas, emotions, facts and images, in dynamic excuse me dance with the world, we see somehow interconnected stories, narratives for life.

These woven narratives new or old to the brain allow us to experience life as something that makes sense, something that is continuous. New memories or ideas that bear relationships to our internal narratives are more easily remembered as they chime with our stereotypes or schema in the internal world we have created, they snuggle next to the information we already hold. That which is unfamiliar or unrelated is more difficult to weave into our story, more difficult to learn, more difficult to ease up against in the cold.

So, we are stories, the records of our lives and experiences, we march on and share our narratives with those that recognise them, that love us for them. The cultures we embrace are made of good and bad examples of stories, heroes and villains, successes and failures. Stories transmit our values and culture, our expectations of how to behave and what behaviour to expect. We learn everything through stories. Researchers argue that not only cultures, but communities of practice, network linkages work more effectively through the sharing of or ‘interweaving of story-lines.’ Storytelling is an important way of codifying knowledge and retaining its richness while still retaining flexibility for knowledge development. It is no wonder then that sales and marketing try to provide us with meaningful narrative around products and services, not a surprise that the stories spread across social media chime with us. Stories see past our local selves.

The importance of narratives and storytelling as ways and means of transmitting and developing knowledge in social groups is the life blood of making sense of the world and transmitting that sense, its morals, rituals and norms. Often a person needs to re-tell the story of an experience before realizing its true meaning and value, listeners and learners benefit equally. This reflective quality of story is the way stories themselves not only transmit ideas but also develop and adapt them. The process of storytelling is then not only didactic and empowering but also creative and sustaining. It binds the teller and the listener together sometimes the connections last a lifetime and sometimes the messages are deep and meaningful, tacit, for example, in this purportedly Native American story: ‘One evening, an old Cherokee tells his grandson that inside all people, a battle goes on between two wolves. One wolf is negativity: anger, sadness, stress, contempt, disgust, fear, embarrassment, guilt, shame, and hate. The other is positivity: joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and above all, love. The grandson thinks about this for a minute, then asks his grandfather, “Well, which wolf wins?” The grandfather replies, “The one you feed.”

It’s because stories are engaging, because they are so easily woven into established knowledge and our ‘ways’ that they somehow also have the ability to transcend ideas, cultures even and see through our own limiting thoughts and analysis of the world. These stories are magical. All of our stories are magical. In a world that is seemingly so socially and organisationally complex, around the campfires of our modern lives, we all know in our hearts and minds which wolf to feed. Stories and our relationship to them are the only things that make our worlds whole but yet can change them by simply sharing a word or perhaps, I live in hope, sharing a world with others.