I love a good story. I think we all do. In every society since time began, the storyteller has been a very important person. There are lots of storytellers around today, but they're mainly corporate types, like Disney or Steven Spielberg. Still, you might find a real-live storyteller at a folk festival or a convention where storytellers gather to exchange ideas. A lot of these people aim what they do at children, because there seems to be this widely-held notion that children appreciate stories more than we jaded adult types. Actually, adults love stories as much as kids; we just don't feel comfortable having a live person telling them in a situation where we have to listen. It's too direct, too personal, and too "interactive." To avoid embarrassment, we prefer to stick to the TV.

Books have traditionally been the preferred medium for disseminating stories, but in what my friend the English professor calls our "post-literate society," they're losing ground everyday. Kids today, he says, don't get their life learning from books as we once did. ( And they can't write or spell too good, neither.)

Anyway, for some reason one summer when I was a kid, I read Charles Dickens "The Pickwick Papers." It's a novel about the ramblings and misadventures of a group of eccentric but loveable older guys who tour the English countryside, picking up all sorts of strange and entertaining characters along the way. Inevitably, each new acquaintance would be asked to tell his own particular "story," after which, they would usually go their way and disappear. So, it was like the whole of each of these characters was totally defined by the story that they were telling. The crazy thing is that now I'm noticing that same tendency in myself and other people, and we're not even characters in a 19th century novel. It's as if, once having formulated my own story, I feel bound to stick to it at all costs. And so it seems to me that many of us live our lives inside stories, constantly reinforced by repeated telling, about why we are the way we are, why we can't do this or that, or why we react to some things in inordinate ways: "I'm sorry, it's because when I was a kid my parents used to make me do ________," or "I just can't help it; I've never been able to ________!"

In other words, "I'm not responsible." And once you throw up your hands and say, in effect, "these things just happened to me. I didn't do anything. I'm just a victim," everything grinds to a halt. There's no power. No possibilities. Does this sound like the easy way out, or what?

A friend of mine who works for the city got injured on the job last spring. When I ran into him a few weeks after the accident, he was a mess. Besides being in pain, he had a whole long tale of woe about Byzantine insurance forms, and conflicting advice from the doctors. But above all, about why this had happened to him. Listening to this, it occurred to me that if he could have separated what really was from the long, messy story about what and why it happened, he would have been in a better position to really deal with his problems.

How do we set about having a mental conversation that dwells on possibilities rather than the lack thereof? From what I can tell, the first step is simple. The next time you start feeling something is wrong, try looking at the story you have about it. Realize that it's a story. It's your story and you're telling the story. What's more, you can tell it anyway you want. Try just being aware of that. You may be amazed at what happens.