I am admittedly a sucker for a good story. Tell me a good story, a good reason to believe, and I’ll do just about anything for you. I’m not talking about pulling on my heart strings. I am talking about appealing to my humanity, my common bond with every man, woman, and child on this earth.
Sometimes I wonder if all this “story-telling” is deceptive. Isn’t there value in the mundanity of every day life? Do we all need to elevate our life’s happenings to “story”? But, alas, it is almost as if we can’t not tell our tale. It’s ingrained in us, since the days of Moses and Abraham, we’ve been whispering over smoky fires, embers burning even as we weave the words.
Is there a point in time where “just the facts” would be truer, or is there always more truth to uncover behind the facts? Shades of agonizing decision and circumstance that needs unpacking? How much do we want to know and how much do we need to know and how much do we want explained?
Some moments I long for the black and white of childhood. Where somehow the boundaries and the truer-than-true that you knew that you knew made life more colorful. I miss that safety, even if it was an illusion. I miss that certainty, because I was so smart then. I was so achingly, stubbornly, naively sure.
But today, I put faces to statistics and narrative to policy. I contrast theory and “should be’s” with the “what actually is”.
And that leaves me unsure. It leaves me wondering and wandering in a weaving path down the party lines.