Gentle Reader, if you have been following my postings you might have noticed that I love stories. There are many different types of stories. This morning I am going to focus on the value and importance of what I call ‘Teaching Stories.’ Stories matter. Teaching stories provide us an opportunity to learn something about ourselves – and perhaps to embrace that learning and integrate it into our lives. Teaching stories also help us face the myriad of challenges that we encounter during our lives.
Telling and receiving stories is not a one-off experience. The most powerful stories are the ones we tell and listen to over and over, perhaps for our life-time. It is also crucial to pass stories on to the next seven generations for our stories inform us and help form who we are and who we are choosing to become.
There are a number of tests that help us determine whether a story is a ‘good’ teaching story – a story that enables us to grow no matter our age. One test involves questions to reflect upon and to respond to. Here are three guiding questions: Is the story enabling me to become more self-aware? Is the story enabling me to deepen my relationship with myself and with the other(s)? Is the story feeding the tap roots that nurture and sustain me (think for example: the tap roots of love, caring, compassion and empathy)?
Yesterday I was reading and the author told a story about the great violinist, Itzhak Perlman. Great stories make the rounds. I cannot recall the number of times I have read or heard this story told. Today, Gentle Reader, I will offer this story to you (a short version – the nice things about stories is that they can be short or long and are rooted in a guiding principle that one never lets facts interfere with a good teaching story).
THE STORY: Once during a performance one of the four strings on his violin broke (my mother was a concernt violinist and so I know this story well as all violinists experience the breaking of a string). Although the piece Perlman was playing was challenging he did not stop; he played on. He played on for more than seven minutes (some say six, some five and some eight); he never missed a note for he, as he was playing, transposed the music from the missing string into the other three. After he finished there was no sound from the audience – actually there was sound, it was the sound of silence (thanks S&G). Perlman walked to a microphone. He looked at the audience, who was still silence-stunned, and said: ‘It is my job to make music out of what remains.’
Indeed, Gentle Reader, each of us is challenged to make something of value with what remains. Our lives are full of loses and we are presented with the remains of those loses. Do we believe – do we strive to – make music out of what remains?
Searcher-Seeker 