Questioning our dark and stormy stories
The magic of new life…or a future ruined lawn? (Image by S. Hermann & F. Richter)
On one dark morning, forty minutes after sunrise, the streetlights came back on.
The clouds were so heavy that they convinced the light’s sensors that it was night.
We humans can be fooled, too. The contrast between a bright sunny day and a moody, cloudy one — or stormy one — is stark. When you’re in one, it’s hard to imagine, from the evidence, that another is possible.
This is how we perceive our stories sometimes, too. We can get so convinced that our miserable, unhelpful story about ourselves is true that we forget that, metaphorically speaking, it’s just clouds blocking the sun.
The facts are immutable; they stand, like trees in the landscape. But depending on the circumstances, they can be colored by the warm tones of sunlight or the grays of an overcast day.
We can use the colors that we see to shape our narrative, or we can recognize that they aren’t the same every day anyway. We can cast things in darkness if we want to feel bad. However, we can choose rosier colors and still be telling the truth.
For example, I can tell the story of a man who bounced from job to job, unable to find a passion. A man who, through sheer luck, inherited a piece of real estate that allowed him to live comfortably despite his career prospects. A man whose wife became the primary breadwinner, allowing him to retire when he felt like it.
But I can also tell the story of a man who put care and effort into everything he did. A man with a genuine love of hard work who could always find a job because of useful and varied skills, honed from a young age working in his grandmother’s shop. A man who, despite a house full of small children, visited his mother twice daily when she began to show signs of dementia and spent long hours caring for her property and handling her affairs even after she was placed in a nursing home. A man who saved and made do and made investment decisions for the long term instead of seeking a windfall. A man who did whatever he could to provide for his family, then continued to work even when he didn’t have to. A man who painstakingly maintained his home inside and out to ease the way for his equally hard-working wife.
Both stories are true, in terms of the facts. But the first one causes harm, and the second uplifts. If I were the man in the story, I would want to give up upon hearing it. But if I heard the second story about myself, I would see the difference I have made in the world and be motivated to continue.
So many of the people I encounter, be they adults or children, seem to believe that it’s somehow more clear-eyed or virtuous to hang onto a story like the first one. But such a story only provides a place to hide. When you minimize your value, it’s easy to justify doing nothing, whereas acknowledging who you can be and what you can contribute, as in a more generous story, suggests the possibility of doing more and realizing your potential. We realize that we might have control over more than we think we do; if we’re miserable or dissatisfied, we might be able to change that. That is not always a welcome message.
If we’re comfortable with our dark and stormy stories, questioning them might be painful. We have to choose between the pain we’re used to — boredom, lack of fulfillment, and low self-worth — and the pain of growth and change. The important thing is to see the choice.
A cloudy day is not a permanent change to the world we know. The sun is still there, only obscured. Your fundamental goodness and value as a person, likewise, can never truly disappear, even if you don’t always see it.
