Where Stories Come From

It seems like only yesterday that I awoke on a Thursday morning, then cycled into school where I taught the final session of our summer program. I went straight from there to the airport where I flew first to LA, then connected to Sydney, Australia. I was then driven to Newcastle, a 2-3 hour drive, where I changed my shirt, then continued 3 more hours north to the town of Kempsey where I delivered a full-day (6 hour) teacher training, before being driven back to Newcastle where I finally lay down to bed.

I've heard nothing but good things about the event in Kempsey, although I can't honestly say I remember much about the final couple hours. I know I maintained my feet and ended about a half hour early. I suspect I skipped a couple pages of my notes. It's not something I'll seek to do again, but the story has served as a kind of social currency these past four weeks as I've jetted, trained, and driven the continent.

I've collected other stories on this trip, including a stay in an old Fawlty Towers-esque hotel in which the door of my bedroom opened up into the busy restaurant, getting booted from a flight for no apparent reason, several exotic animal sightings, and making new friends. 

This is one of the reasons we travel, of course, to collect stories. In fact, as far as I can tell it's primary reason we're compelled to at least occasionally break-up the comfortable routine of our lives. Indeed I wonder sometimes if that's the reason we are here at all, not just to fart around, but to collect stories with which to regale our friends and families long into our declining years.

As I've lived them, these past 30 days have been exciting, wearying, edifying, and often stressful, full of people, events, travel, meals, and obstacles, time whizzing, each day ending with a thankful fall into whatever bed was made for me that night. Yet looking back from the perspective of this end, the days seem to have been impossibly long, rich and full. 

That's how time works, of course, for all of us: when we live days of action and variety, we experience them as short in the living, yet long in the memory, while our days of routine, peace, and familiarity may pass slowly, but appear in hindsight as having disappeared without a trace. The great German author Thomas Mann referred to this phenomenon as living life, by turns, vertically and horizontally, the goal, of course, being to find a balance.

Our stories only come from the times during which we've lived vertically, uprooting and challenging ourselves, doing things we've not only never done before, but that we may have doubted that we could even do. And when we've done them, we then tell them: tragedy or comedy or both, and it seems like only yesterday because it was.

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