life on earth
How the Stories We Tell Mold Our Future Tzvi Freeman
F
rom some observation deck up in your brain, there’s a voice broadcasting a play-by-play narrative of your life. Sometimes we are aware, sometimes not, but our minds are perpetually telling a story. There are times when that voice constructs a full-blown drama of intrigue. There are also times when an entire tale is told with just a quiet sigh deep in the liminal recesses of the mind, whispering “Ugh, what a waste of time!” Raw reality provides none of that. That narrative your mind is telling is not a passive record of facts, a mere shadow cast by the actors, a neutral frame for a snapshot of time. Rather , much as our sense of touch knows a thing through our manipulation of it, so too our minds, observing, processing and spewing out their commentary in the background, provide structure, meaning and import to every experience of our lives. All with those little stories. And they’re not necessarily benign. The narratives of humankind have driven tribes to conquer and grow to empires, sustained civilizations and allowed them to
fall—and then regenerated them from the dust. More than any other tool of humankind, our legends have been responsible for building the world in which we currently live. Our faith in those mega-stories will determine whether that world implodes, decays or flourishes. So too, the micro-stories each of us tell of our own private dramas determine the conquest of our personal destinies. Stories are the channels we dig within our psyches through which our past will flow into our future. Let’s say the story we tell of today is of time wasted with no good outcome, of utter frustration in which we were the dog chasing its tail, the ant following a futile recursive path of its own making. We have effectively blocked the flow of the stream of life. We have robbed both yesterday and tomorrow of their vitality, rendering them a parched no man’s land, just as dead as we cast them to be. But if we tell a story of that same day, this time of lessons learned and wisdom gained— for there is nothing really, not even a single
moment in G‑d’s world, that doesn’t sing out infinite wisdom to anyone who will lend an open ear and clarity of mind—then we have opened wide the portals of life to gush into our world and nurture a vibrant tomorrow. Because the streams of life that flow from Above into our world can bring only good. The true, objective reality, wrote Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi to a friend and disciple, is nothing other than the perpetual unfolding of Divine wisdom at every moment, regenerating every detail of our world from the void—its past, present and future. And Divine wisdom is the origin of all life, goodness and pleasure, the primal Eden that waters the Garden from an unknowable place far beyond. It is up to us only to open our psyches wide and clear, so we can commune with that life in its purest form. And all that happens through those little stories in your mind. Let’s say the story we tell of our current sorrows is an angry one, a bitter one, a tale of the poor victim in a meaningless, G‑dless world—then we would be polluting the stream of life with harsh toxins. What hope
ЭКСОДУС | АВГУСТ - СЕНТЯБРЬ | 2020
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