What About Storytelling

Humanity has told stories since primordial times to relay vital information. Stories give us a way to relive an experience, to interact with the unfamiliar, and to understand meaning and purpose in new situations.

Through Storytelling we can build connections with those around us and with those in the distant past. As a story is told, the teller and the listeners share an experience, as if they have lived the same story.

Storytelling is an invaluable art form, and it’s practice continued offers us life wisdom refined across countless generations.

Stories Build Connections Between People And Communities

Storytelling is by its very nature a humanizing practice. A person-to-person connection is made when the storyteller shares a past experience (or a fictitious one) with the listener.

And in this way the storyteller and the listener come to have a shared experience, not only literally, but also through a shared sense that they have both ‘relived’ the same story.

What exactly does the listener experience? The listener’s imagination gives the mind a sense of witnessing the scenes in the story, and the emotions of every struggle and victory. The heart beats faster in excitement or tragedy, the muscles tighten during a battle description, and the mouth laughs at humorous points or when wrongs have been made right. The spirit is built up when reminded where we as a community came from, what we went through, and where we are going. “As our ancestors knew, storytelling is a holistic process that engages the heart, body, and spirit along with the mind.”[1]

Stories are a medium for relating abstract things to each other. Death, life, suffering, jealousy, patience, justice, hope, fear, and honor to name a few. Such things are at the center of the human experience. We can tell each other abstract descriptions of each of these, but we will never know them in a familiar way until we’ve experienced them.

The shared experiences in storytelling have the power to grow communities, families, and even nations closer. Stories connect lives, and invite each person to join the life of the community to which the story belongs. For many American Native communities, stories where “considered to be a sacred link to an ever continuing process of life and death, honoring all the relations that make up who we are as human beings.”[2]

In other words, stories often serve as a memory tool across generations to preserve the importance of certain traditions and values. When new paradigms put a communal value at risk, stories can preserve that value by continually reminding the community of the value’s relation to the community and it’s role in the greater narrative.

Exploring Unknown Dangers Through Story

Author notes, “Telling stories is a way to make sense of our own experience and to communicate that experience to others.” We can explore new and unseen scenarios through story.

This is why so many folk stories involve an unusual monster, often one that is difficult to picture. We know how to interact with a bull. We know how to interact with a person. But how do you interact with a half-man half-bull minotaur?

The Minotaur, and other fantastic dangers in folk stories, serve as a placeholder for the unknown, the unfamiliar, and the dangers beyond the horizon of our imagination. Interacting with the unknown monster, or his monstrous labyrinth, provides an arena to learn how to respond to the unknowns ahead of us.

Due to it’s flexibility, Storytelling readily adapts to new challenges facing the community. Lessons and experiences from old stories are often refined as the community gains further interaction with the unknown and unfamiliar.

A Tool For Survival

Stories are so much more than a chronological list of facts. Stories area an interaction with the world, in the interest of discovering and relaying meaning. Storytelling is a struggle to find purpose, and to communicate that purpose to ourselves and each other.

Rather than begin at square one, every young person has the immense privilege of tapping into the lived experiences of persons who have gone before them, and how they found meaning in the midst of confusion and difficulty. Every person can familiarize themselves to these abstract concepts and benefit from wisdom passed down across many generations through folk stories.

Ancient communities have learned many lessons the hard way. They have put these lessons, the struggles, and the found meaning within the medium of story. As a folk story is told in each generation, it gets refined, such that it resonates even deeper within us.

When you listen to a folktale, you are not listening to a single storyteller, nor a single author. A folktale is a masterpiece crafted by a community over generations. And such a story serves as a tool for the community’s survival and flourishing.

Aspects of popular stories have often been repurposed, to convey a new paradigm. Examples abound of a deeply familiar deity, animal, location, or character appearing in a new story. Because the listener is already familiar with the element from the old story, the new story, and the embedded lessons, becomes easily digestible.

storytelling has a way of linking the past to the present, to pass along a collective memory of experiences, and yield a to a wiser future for the community. “And that’s the purpose of storytelling: teaching people who they are so they can become all they were meant to be.”[3]

Conclusion

Storytelling connects us with each other, in the present as well as with the ancient past. Stories open the door to shared experiences, and provide an arena to explore abstract meaning. Humanity has used stories to interact with the unknown, and as a survival tool in the face of changing times and new challenges. Storytelling is a vital part of what it means to be human. And the benefits of accessing collective life wisdom call for us to practice, and not forget, this ancient art form.