What Are You Telling Yourself?

When you look at this pic­ture, what are your imme­di­ate thoughts? Does a “story” come to mind imme­di­ately to explain it?”

photo credit: paalia

If so, then you are in good com­pany. Prob­a­bly every­one you know does the same thing. As humans, we are story mak­ers. We see a per­son or sit­u­a­tion and we imme­di­ately cre­ate a story about what we see. That’s because the human mind is not sat­is­fied unless it has an expla­na­tion of things we encounter in life.

I think the need to know may be intrin­si­cally linked with our need for safety. In other words, we feel safer when we think we under­stand some­thing; even if it’s an expla­na­tion that causes great dis­tress. We pre­fer our own made up and painful story about real­ity over a state of ‘not knowing.’

We just need to feel like we know. There­fore we explain every­thing to our­selves in an ongo­ing men­tal dia­log with our­selves. But the thing is — some­times (often, for many of us) our men­tal chats with our­selves, so chock-full of unques­tioned “expla­na­tions” about what we see, are sim­ply not true!

But once we have an expla­na­tion, we just assume that it’s true. We believe these sto­ries, boy, do we ever BELIEVE them! We believe our sto­ries so com­pletely some­times that we hang on to them with our teeth bared, ready to bite any­one who disagrees!

Let’s take the pic­ture above as a hypo­thet­i­cal, but nonethe­less, com­mon­place sort of example:

I asked Susanna what her impres­sions of this pic­ture were. She expressed imme­di­ate con­cern for the young boy in the photo who was “obvi­ously (in her mind) being forced to work.” She launched into an ani­mated dia­tribe about child slave labor and how unjust it is for busi­ness own­ers to take such unfair advan­tage of chil­dren in poverty sit­u­a­tions. She expressed bit­ter­ness towards those who would mis­treat such “poor, under­priv­i­leged, children.”

Doreen’s impres­sions were quite oppo­site; look­ing at the same pic­ture brought her a rem­i­nis­cent smile. She said the young boy’s facial expres­sion brought back child­hood mem­o­ries for her of hang­ing out in her grandfather’s store on days she would have pre­ferred to be out­side play­ing. She went on to say how lucky she felt to have been a part of a fam­ily who worked in a busi­ness together. “It gave me a sense of impor­tance and mean­ing to know that my fam­ily depended on me to do my part.”

Jil­lian had yet another take on the photo. She saw the chil­dren as wait­ing patiently for their par­ents to fin­ish their day. She felt a lit­tle miffed at the par­ents for not hav­ing their chil­dren “home doing their school­work,” and at the same time, impressed with how patient “chil­dren from other cul­tures are as com­pared to our own.”

The point is — we all have a dif­fer­ent story about what we see and expe­ri­ence. This is sim­ply the way we are. We see and expe­ri­ence some­thing and we cre­ate a story about it. Con­scious­ness comes from observ­ing what we see and the sto­ries that arise about those things with­out get­ting too attached to our par­tic­u­lar expla­na­tions about them. Because who knows, our story just might not be true!

Bless­ings, Lynne