The Power Of A Good Story
Photo by Luriko Yamaguchi from Pexels
We can’t escape stories. They’re all around us — in the media we consume, in the advertisements we can’t skip past, and in our answers to simple questions like, “How was your day?”
We understand our lives in terms of story, as narratives from birth to the present moment. We hope for better days, and dream of ways our stories could unfold in years to come.
But stories are more than just default narrative and fact-telling structures for our daily lives. They’re at the very heart of what makes us human and keeps us humane; a story has the power to communicate truths about the human experience that we could never get from mere facts or data.
Consider first hand accounts told by Holocaust survivors. You could get the facts from a history book, or understand the devastation in terms of numbers and countable-losses. But you learn something different — something inexpressible and vitally important — when you listen to a survivor recall their experiences. For a moment, while you entertain their story, you’re invited to see the world through their eyes. You’re given a perspective outside of yourself.
“You learn something different — something inexpressible and vitally important — when you listen to a survivor recall their experiences.”
But a story’s power is not limited to its historical fact. The myths and legends that have inspired humankind since before we even thought to preserve them in books prove this; or the parables of Jesus — technically they were fictions, and yet, they had the power to teach great truths.
Stories expand our horizons of possibility; they teach us empathy by exposing us to viewpoints we might never imagine otherwise. But they also have the power to propagate lies, mire us in untruths, and reinforce our insecurities.
Whether we recognize it or not, each of us has grown up with a specific and highly nuanced set of presuppositions about the way the world is and ought to be. The stories we’re told as children — the stories we’re born into — inescapably shape our expectations of the world and our place in it.
“The stories we’re born into inescapably shape our expectations of the world and our place in it.”
Those expectations, left unchecked, can become limitations. How many of us have spent a significant portion of our adulthood slowly unweaving the tangled web of expectations and beliefs we inherited from the stories we were told as children?
Think about the fairy-tales that shaped us; deep down, we knew they weren’t true. But still, they communicated truths to us and told us what to expect from life. I learned to value patiences, kindness, and adventure from the princess stories I loved as a kid — but I also blindly accepted the narrative that if you believe hard enough and persevere long enough, you’re due a storybook happy ending. Those stories didn’t aim to teach me this, but perhaps they didn’t realize their own significance.
So how do we move past a false narrative like that? By replacing it with a good, beautiful, and true one. Stories are inescapable, yes. And they’re also necessary. A true story — be it fiction or fact — is the surest weapon against the lies we would otherwise believe.
