From the time I was a little girl, I had to learn to entertain myself while my parents or grandparents were driving. And we always seemed to be driving somewhere; driving with my grandparents to visit relatives in Michigan (16 hour drive), driving to the beach (1 hour drive), driving to Boston (3 hours away) to go shopping, driving to one of my Grandfather’s medical seminars in various New England states, and hour long Saturday or Sunday afternoon drives so the adults could “relax.” Driving. Always driving.
At the age of 3, or even 5 years old, I was too young to read, and this was long before the era of live streaming on your phone or even portable DVD players. I didn’t have a tablet or Gameboy to entertain me. My grandmother absolutely forbade crayons in the car (they will melt and make a mess!), so I couldn’t color, and as any little child does, I would get bored of whatever toys I had been allowed to bring with me in fairly fast order.
Sometimes the adults would play games with me. The “alphabet game” was one. “Count the animals” was another (though this only worked on rural drives). “I spy with my little eye” was one that the adults always seemed to think a kid would like, but that I found boring. More often than not we would go through one or two cycles of any one of those games and then the adults, apparently feeling that they had done their due diligence, would drift off to whatever it was that they had been doing before we started playing the game; talking, listening to music, reading etc., and once more I’d be left to shift for myself. Thank goodness I had – and still have – a vivid imagination.
My imagination enabled me to master the knack of blocking out everything that was going on around me and then pick out an object which I would tell myself stories about in my head. I go so that I could SEE those stories like movies playing out just for me.
The pretty tree with the flowers all over it, that was an angel tree where, if you sat quietly enough, an angel would come and talk to you and bring you tigers and lions to pet and help you weave garlands for your hair, and when you had to go they would take a feather from their wing and give it to you so that you would never forget them.
That hill over there, that was really the roof of an underground house where small furry creatures no bigger than myself had created their houses. They had painted their ceiling blue with white clouds and in that hill, I had a small house of my own where I was always safe and never had to worry about the things the grownups talked about.
I remember once driving through Portland, Maine, I saw the city reflected perfectly – but upside down in the still-glass water of the back-bay and I lost myself in a beautiful reflection world where I was a grown-up lady who wrote beautiful books and let children play in her crystal garden.
I would look into other cars as we would pass by them (or as they passed us) and imagine where those people were going. What were they saying right now? What song were they listening to? Were those children as bored as I was?
The little girl who told herself stories while driving grew up of course, and learned to read, so the drives were not as boring any more. Then she began driving herself. But that well-developed imagination never did completely disappear.
Once while driving through New York City at night, I found myself stunned as usual by the sheer number of twinkling lights outlining the sky scrapers and thinking about all the people that those lights represented. If you thought of each of those lights as representing just one person, the total seemed staggering. To realize that each light probably represented a minimum of 10 people, maybe more, sent my mind reeling.
So many lights. So many buildings. So many people.
And then a thought hit me so hard I nearly swerved into a Semi while on the cross-Bronx expressway.
Each of those people was a story.
Not just lights.
Not just people.
They were stories.
All of them were stories.
Every story has three things; a beginning, a middle and an end.
People are born (beginning) and they die (end). In between they are living out their own individual story. In each of these stories, the person living it imagines that they are the protagonist of their story. The world responds to them, events happen to them. They have specific feelings and respond in specific ways because of what happens to them. In everyone’s story, they are the center point around which the story revolves. Them, their families, friends, neighbors, communities, country – in ever expanding concentric circles like ripples on a pond, each of which has that particular person at the center.
And because it is a very big pond, there are over seven billion other stories being told simultaneously, all of the concentric circles overlapping each other, some cancelling each other out, others expanding exponentially as they merge with other circles to make bigger “waves.”
This is why we always tell our stories in the first person. “I did this” or “I went here” or “the news of this (insert event) impacted me positively/negatively.” We say it this way because we are telling our story.
That nighttime New York insight has never truly left me. Now, every time I drive by buildings, even by a strip mall, I find myself imagining all the people that are working in each of the stores or businesses. That strip mall, that store in the strip mall, that one building on the street, that one window in the building, that is their job. They go there every day and spend a good chunk of their day doing whatever it is they do. They eat their lunch. They go home at night to wherever it is that they sleep and/or spend time with whichever people or on whatever. Then they get up and do it all over again.
For many, what they do is very important, whether it is because what it is they are doing is important to them, or because they need the money the job provides in order to keep their apartment and health insurance. I have to wonder, do they ever realize that they are not just “making a living” but that they are actively creating a life? Do they realize that they are, in each and everything that they do, telling their own personal story?
Do these people ever look at the people outside of their building, at the people in the cars driving past them on their way to work, and wonder about those people’s stories? Do they wonder where they are going? What kind of a job they are headed to? Are they happy? Do they have a partner? Children? Pets? What are the thoughts that occupy their minds all day? What is it they do for fun? Do they have dreams that they are actively pursuing, or have they given up and are just existing from one day to the next?
So many people. Most of them so wrapped up in their own stories that they are totally unaware of the other stories unfolding around them. So many people feeling lonely because no one seems particularly interested in their story. Indeed, there are those who choose to end their stories because they feel as if no one is listening.
Just think what kind of a world it would be if we listened to even a tiny fraction of the stories that are being told, all around us, every minute of the day. Just by listening to others tell their story, we not only may have impacted another person’s life, but by interacting with them, we have added richness and depth to our own.
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