Telling Stories

I listened to a podcast last night that talked about a pair of teenage siblings who invented a family to get out of their strict curfew. They would be constantly babysitting for this fictional family. In order to avoid suspicion, the kids crafted the dad as an F.B.I. Agent who could not reveal the details of the family to the the teenagers family. This provided a perfect cover for the siblings to peruse around town late into the night without having to worry.

I brought this up because it goes back to telling stories and how the imagination can help people in more ways than imagined. It's strikingly similar to the Scheherazade story of how she had to craft stories to stay alive. In the case of the lying baby sitters, they had to continually make up more elaborate tales about this fictional family. This family had a summer house so that they could hang out the lake all summer. The lie went on for so long that the mother gradually came to believe the lie out of comfort. In a sense, the mother wanted the kids to have this freedom and yet not under her direct blessing. It parallels the Scheherazade story where the king knew that he could kill the storyteller at any minute, but because he was so entertained and so interested he overlooked his original convictions.

Ultimately Professor Sexson is entertained by our stories and blogs because they are stories within stories. We are all Scheherazade's making up stories to pass the time and be interesting. Although we won't die if we stop telling stories, we might die a bit inside. Deep down we want to be interesting; we want to have an audience for our stories. If we're not telling our stories, than we might as well be dead. There will certainly be more interesting people that will step in to tell their story. Are we really living if we don't tell our story? There are dead people more interesting than living people because the dead people have enough stories to propel their legacy. If we only tell people our stories, then our legacy only lasts a generation, at best. I know I can be more interesting than a dead person. It won't be easy, but all I have to do is accumulate enough stories in writing to build up an interesting repertoire.

The moral of this story is tell stories or die. I just lived to see another day just by writing this blog.