Our Whole Lives Are Just Stories

I am a huge fan of the Vikings. 

Yeah.  No.  Not those Vikings.  Let me clarify.

On the History Channel there is a historical/costume drama called “The Vikings.”  It is created by the same imagination behind Showtime’s “The Tudors” and “The Borgias.”  His name is Michael Hirst and the guy knows his history.  He does a very good job at dramatizing it for public consumption.  “The Tudors,” of course, tells the story of King Henry VIII and his wives.  “The Borgias” is about Pope Alexander VI and his illegitimate and often times frightening family who served as inspiration for the modern epic “The Godfather.” 

“Vikings” is a drama that focuses on—wait for it—the Vikings, those conquering warriors from Scandinavian lands who terrorized (and to a certain extent civilized) much of Europe, especially the British Isles, around the 8^th century.   I’m a fan not just because I think Michael Hirst is a gifted story teller but because “Vikings” speaks to my heritage.  My mother’s mother was first generation born in the United States; her parents emigrated from Norway.  Of all of my ethnic backgrounds, my Norse ancestry is the least explored.  So not only am I entertained by “Vikings,” it causes me to think and gives me direction to read and research something that seems too large and unknown to know where to begin.   

I’ve started re-watching the series again in preparation for the premiere of the new season.  I often stream something in the background while I’m working and, since today is Saturday and blog writing day, I had “Vikings” going while I tried to write, back up, and start over.  Some days the blog writes itself.  Some days I can’t seem to put two sentences together without abandoning the effort and starting over a dozen times.

Guess what kind of day today was. 

And then the sky opened and the Norse gods literally smiled down on me and I knew I finally had the angle for the post I was struggling to compose. 

Season one, episode seven.  Our hero, the recently made Earl, Ragnar, has headed west again to sack British villages and towns and his imposing wife, Lagertha, a character who would score high on the Bechdel Test, is left in charge.  A married couple, who had apparently struggled for years with an inability to have children, present themselves in front of Lagertha.  Apparently the woman had given birth to a son and her husband was outraged, declaring that the child couldn’t possibly be his.  He relates to Lagertha and “the court” that a young man calling himself Rig had visited their home roughly nine months before and the husband was certain that the stranger was the father of the child.  His wife, in tears, said she didn’t know who the father of the child was.

Lagertha, who is as intelligent in court as she is deadly on a battle field, beckons the woman closer to her place on the throne.  She asks the mother, “Do you know who this Rig was?”  And, of course, the woman trivializes him by saying he was just some young man.  Lagertha continues:  “On the contrary.  We know from our ancient stories that Rig is another name for Heimdal.”  This stuns the young mother who can’t seem to get her head around the idea that this young man who had visited her could possibly be one of the Viking gods.  Lagertha says, “You are fortunate that he chose your household to appear.”

The husband isn’t having any of this.  He says, “My lady!  That’s just a story!”  and Lagertha, fixing him with a contemptuous gaze, responds, “Our whole lives are just stories.”  She continues by chastising the husband for not trusting his wife despite the joy and comfort she has brought him by delivering him a son.  Lagertha’s judgment?  “Do not punish her.  Rejoice with her.  Drink wine with her.  And sacrifice one of your animals to Heimdal the God.  But if I hear that you’ve harmed this woman, or this child, you will answer for it to me.”

Okay, so Lagertha’s judgment and warning go beyond where I could have stopped but…I just couldn’t stop myself.  Lagertha’s a badass and to stop where her words started to serve my purpose would be to ruin Lagertha’s story. 

And, since I want to talk about this idea of story, I couldn’t very well destroy this one to prove my point.

“Our whole lives are just stories.”

From the moment we are born to the day we are laid in a casket with family and friends gathered around us, celebrating our lives, we are a story.  We are the protagonist and sometimes our own worst antagonist.  Every experience we have, every struggle we meet and every success we achieve, creates the arc of our story complete with chapters and themes. 

We wear the advertisements of our story on bodies, in our social media, and even in our vocations.  These things become our book’s cover, our public readings, and the forum for encouraging from others a deeper understanding of our story and through our story a deeper understanding of the world.  This about David Sedaris telling stories from his life in his books or on “This American Life” which connect to larger themes and provoke greater thought.

We are also “storied at” throughout our lives.  The great narrative of our history surrounds us, with its shame and its victories.  Our religious traditions imbue us with yet more story.  The stories of the people in our lives—our family, our friends, our colleagues and coworkers—all bring their stories into our lives and, just as the sharing of our story with them broadens their understanding of the world, in the sharing of their stories we begin to see things differently as well. 

We can’t escape the idea of being caught up in a story or being storied by institutions, conventions, and family traditions.  Why?  Because our stories are the only thing we have to make sense of our lives.

It kind of makes me think of that scene at the end of “Men in Black 2” where Agent K shows Agent J that the world is bigger than what J believes it is.  This is how we make sense of our lives, by connecting it to larger stories outside of ourselves. 

How we hear stories and how we remember stories help us to learn and to understand.  From our oldest religions we have….stories.  From our history text books we have….stories.  From our parents and grandparents we have….stories.  From our teachers we have…stories.  To our children we give…stories. 

Think about the last conversation you had.  Maybe you were trying to explain why you chose to study what you studied in university.  Maybe you were trying to share something you thought was funny.  Maybe you were trying to help someone understand that whatever they were going through is something many people have experienced.  You can’t do any of these things without sharing your story. 

Here’s where we tend to run into trouble.

Because our world is smaller and moves faster than it ever has before we are considerably more disconnected from the “story keepers” in our lives.  Now, I’m not saying that parents and grandparents have all of the answers because they flat out don’t.  But traditionally, when the world was larger and slower, the older people in our lives were able to hold onto our communal stories—our histories, our traditions, etc.—and could place them (and us) into the context of time.  It was from their sharing that we could learn more about our place in the world.  We were more rooted as a Western people. 

Some of you might be old enough to remember “The Waltons.”  I think it’s still on TV running on Halmark channel now.  It’s a story of a multigenerational family living through the depression and World War II.  It aired during the 1970’s.  Think about the grandfather in that show:  He was always ready to share a story, to anchor his grandchildren in their history, but he absolutely never told them who they should be or what they should do with that knowledge.  That’s an ideal example of what I’m talking about with regard to the “story keepers” from the older generations. 

But that’s not the world we live in anymore—if any of us actually did live in a world in which we were fortunate enough to have a Socratic story teller like Grandpa Walton.  Instead we bump along as best we can, children of working parents and chaotic, frenetic families, learning what it means to be ourselves while being told through the stories in our music, in our friendships, through the internet, from teachers and leaders that we should be this way and we shouldn’t be that way.  We are bombarded with stories that are not our own and can’t possibly be our own and it confuses us and it distracts us from our own story. 

We used to call it “peer pressure.”  We were told by people who seemed cooler than us what we should do, how we should act, what we should wear, and so on so that we could be cool, too.  I’m sure our peers still do this but I think what we suffer from now is story confusion. We watch shows on Nick and Disney and we see people we want to be.  We want their stories.  We mimic their behaviors and copy their voices and mannerisms.  We become an echo of a fictional person because we become convinced that this person who shares our lives through the television is who and what we should be. 

And it’s not just teen programming.  Think about your favorite shows and how, even as an adult, you want to be cool or successful or liberated like your show’s hero.  Or you want to live into a romanticized life where the complications of work-a-day life are resolved by clever wit in a reasonable amount of time without a great deal of the mess that real world problems deliver to their victims. 

Now think beyond television.  Think about the music you listen to and how we adopt these stories.  In my non-Troy Comets work I have confronted a number of people over changes in their personalities because of the music that they start listening to.  “You become the music that you listen to” is repeated by me over and over in many different contexts.  We’ve all seen this happen.  Someone is introduced to “emo music” and they begin to dress and act and talk “emo.”  Someone is introduced to “country music” and all of a sudden they’re telling us about running out of beer, their girlfriend leaving them, their truck not starting, and their dog dying.

Sorry.  I couldn’t help myself.  There’s more to country music than losing alcoholic beverages and riding around in pickup trucks.

I think. 

But you get the idea, I hope.  And this really isn’t a new phenomenon.  People have done this ever since human beings learned to tell stories.  Our stories have heroes and we want to emulate those heroes.  We want to be remembered in story just like our heroes are remembered.  It happens in holy writings and it happens in secular writings.  Think about this clip from “A Christmas Carol” in which Ebenezer Scrooge talks about the comfort he received as a child from the heroes in his books. 

We have to train ourselves to keep our own stories uncluttered and untangled from the stories of the people around us, whether they are real or not or directly in our lives or not.  If we lose track of our stories we lose track of ourselves.  The confusion of our own story is one of the biggest causes of identity issues people face today.  It’s definitely tricky since we have, as a whole in the Western World, lost our traditional anchors (for better or worse, by the way) and in place of these story keepers we have, through technology, gazillions of other stories to adopt or sort through or learn from. 

I’m not sure what the solution is when it comes to story confusion.  I have ideal, textbook-based thoughts on it but we don’t live in such a black and white world anymore and I think these idyllic solutions only act to confuse our stories even more.  It’s just another voice telling another story of what we should be. 

I think the only thing I’m comfortable saying about the topic (at least right now) is this:  People need to figure out how to hold onto their own stories.  Here’s what I mean.  Since its premiere on Tuesday night, I’ve watched on social media how people have responded to the characters and the stories of “The Real O’Neals.”  The ones I enjoy the most are the ones that read like “I see so much of myself in [insert character’s name here].”  That’s healthy, wonderful, and incredibly helpful in discovering your own story.  It starts “from home” and moves outward to touch on someone else’s story.  The alternative would be “I really want to be [insert character’s name here].”  In this statement we don’t even start “from home” and immediately want to adopt a story that isn’t ours. 

I hope I haven’t made this too complicated to follow.  I am going somewhere with all of this.  Trust me.  I wouldn’t be laying all of this seemingly complicated mumbo-jumbo out there for you, dear reader, if I didn’t have a plan in mind.  But let me summarize it all for now like this:

“Our whole lives are just stories.”  We have our internal stories that help us understand ourselves and the world around us and we have our external stories that help us orient ourselves in time and place.  All of these stories live in us but are occasionally threatened by stories that aren’t ours that demand our attention and tantalize our imagination and want to usurp the stories that actually make us who we are and not a character on TV, an idea of a person from a song, or an understanding of who our heroes are.  We need to pay close attention to how other people’s stories interact with ours, how that interaction might help us tell our story or might confuse us and draw us away from our story. 

Stay tuned for part two.