An essential weirdness permeates all good stories: the weirdness of purpose. Things in stories happen for reasons; they must, for stories to make sense. Authorial intent and meaning require a basic assumption of cause and effect to be intelligible. Strong narrative structure entails strong beginnings and strong endings; good characters need good motivations; resonant themes shine brightly by definition. Even those stories whose point is ambiguity and dissatisfaction nonetheless have a point.
In these ways, stories are not like life. Life is filled with the random, the meaningless, the unintelligible. Life's complexity resists the sort of throughlines present in even the simplest narratives; life's level of detail eludes any attempt to capture it all. In a fraction of a second, we can have a thought that would take us hundreds of pages to try to describe, and even after all those reams, we'd still feel like we didn't quite explain it right. And (in another way in which life and stories are different) even after all that, we still have no idea what will happen next. So much of life is happenstance, and therefore naturally opposed to formulation. As my friend Kathleen told me, "You can't accidentally write anything. You can't accidentally create."
I often tell people I stopped being Christian because I went to a Chinese Christian camp with a charismatic pastor who delivered all these powerful sermons about life, but I got so much more value out of the non-theologic parts of his sermon that I stopped believing in God. I saw how all the important parts -- loving my family, listening to my parents, taking pride in my heritage, having meaningful conversations, resisting temptation, being still -- were attached to a totally vestigial, evidence-free religious dogma I could easily jettison, and jettison I did. Or so the story goes.
The problem with this story is that it doesn't make any sense. The pastor (whom everyone loved, and who was a truly gifted speaker) structured his entire message around God, the importance of God, and how wonderful God was. Indeed, his whole point was that all that other stuff about loving your family or whatever was totally vestigial, and could be easily jettisoned if love of God wasn't also present. Why didn't I feel the weight of the essential core of his message as much as I felt the other parts? I have no explanation. Furthermore, I know plenty of people -- people in my age group, with similar backgrounds, whom I still know today -- who were heavily impacted by that core message of God, who cite that guy's sermons as a key inspiration for their personal devotion to Jesus and to church, and who will tell my same story with the opposite outcome. Why did our paths diverge so radically?
I want to ascribe the divergence to something intelligible, but I can't. The truth is, there are probably thousands of minute factors -- genetic, environmental, stupid -- I'm not aware of. Maybe my personality meant I never had a chance of committing my life to Christianity from birth, or maybe I'm still a mere breath away from becoming a pastor myself. Maybe the peculiarities of the connections between my neurons caused me to interpret the pastor's mannerisms in a totally different way, or maybe I was too busy chewing an especially tough piece of fingernail to hear a crucial sentence that would've changed everything. There are whole reams of reasons why this massively impactful moment in my life could have broken the other way, and I regularly choose to ignore them. I exclude those details in service of telling a more logical narrative.
The same is true for other stories I tell: how I started liking rap music after listening to it on full blast in my teammate's car (many people, including friends of mine, got turned off of rap music precisely because its listeners blasted it on the street), how I never built a great relationship with my siblings because my dad was yelling at us all the time (there are tons of siblings for whom that sort of abuse is galvanizing rather than isolating), how I love writing because I love reading (some of my best friends are avid readers and readily admit to hating their own writing and avoiding the practice at all costs).
It's a lot easier to explain why something happened if you already know it happened. The stories we tell ourselves about our lives are not our lives; they are carefully manicured things, curated for purpose and plot through the darkly tinted lens of hindsight.
Stories are weird. They reside just beyond the uncanny valley of un-reality, contain just enough truth to deceive us into thinking they are all truth, when even the very best stories are but shadows of our indescribably rich and complex lives. But at the same time, stories are an essential component of the human experience. They are the only tool we can use to extract meaning from a sea of gibbering chaos. They are the best way to share all the roiling complexity bubbling up within us, and in so doing, lighten our individual burdens. And so, even though they churn with all this subtle strangeness and false promise, stories are all we really have.
As I reflect back on 2020, I can’t help but conceive of the year as a collection of stories. And I already know I'm going to assign a lot of meaning and purpose to those stories, and there are going to be logical cause-and-effect relationships and character motivations and (hopefully) bright throughlines in my reflections. I want to frame all those things appropriately. I don’t want to lose sight of the frailty and myopia of my own constrained perspective. And I'm hoping that after reading this, you’ll be able to frame all the stories you tell yourself with all the subtlety and caution they deserve.
“I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.” -Ecclesiastes 9:11
Part of the inspiration for this came from this video.
