We tell stories to talk out the trouble in our lives, trouble otherwise so often so unspeakable. It is one of our main ways of making our lives sensible. Trying to live without stories can make us crazy. They help us recognize what we believe to be most valuable in the world, and help us identify what we hold demonic.
Interpretation
Stories help us make sense of our troubles and beliefs.
William Kittredge's quote emphasizes the significance of storytelling in processing our life's challenges and experiences. By sharing and listening to stories, we find coherence in our struggles, recognize our values, and confront the darker aspects of our lives, suggesting that narratives are essential to not only understand ourselves but also to maintain our sanity amidst chaos.
In practice
In a therapy session, a counselor could use this quote to emphasize the importance of narrative in healing.
It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.
The bible teaches that women brought sin and death into the world. I don't believe that any man ever talked with god. The bible was written by man out of his love of domination.
The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of ego-centrism.
We don‘t have faith that #freedom works. We have evidence.
The Lord withdraws when He is denied, and what is taken by the undeserving does not avail them unto salvation, since the saving grace is turned into ashes and holiness departs.
Rationalism belongs to the cool observer. But because of the stupidity of the average person, they follow not reason, but faith. This naïve faith, requires necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications, which are provided by the myth maker to keep the ordinary person on course.
Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.
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