live without a story

Can we live life without a story?

Our experience of life, our individual personal direct experience, has two components to it. One is our perception, our awareness of the present moment, all our senses feeding us something rich and unique this moment. There might be sounds, there might be smells and tastes. We might have visual and touch sensations. All of this is very immediate in the moment, right now. But that's only a part of our experience. We also have a story, a narrative, which our mind creates.

Our mind is really a great storyteller. It has memories from the past, and it is busy weaving this present moment into that long narrative. And it's even projecting the narrative into the future, even though it knows not what the future will bring. So we have our personal story, and if you look carefully, you'll see that everything you think yourself to be, is nothing but this story. It's a work of fiction, perhaps loosely based on reality, on your interpretation of a series of events that have laid down memories in your mind. But really it's a fiction, a work of fiction. It's a story.

Now there's nothing wrong with a story, as long as we understand it to be no more than that. It can be entertaining. It can be happy or sad. It can have its twists and turns as the plot thickens. It can be very entertaining. But it's only a story. The difficulty that most of us humans have got into, is we have begun to really believe this story. We take fiction to be reality, and then all the trouble starts.

It's as if we have gone to watch a movie and forgotten that it is just entertainment, to be enjoyed, perhaps to give us some food for thought, perhaps to stir up emotions in us. But at the end of the day its fiction. It's entertainment. It is not real. And because we have become so obsessed with our personal narrative, our own story, we have tended to lose touch with the present moment, with all the nourishing sensations that existence is feeding to us, in this moment, right now, it's delicious. But we are so busy, we are so preoccupied with our story, that we tend to overlook the present moment. And yet the present moment is where reality is to be found: the sounds, the smells, the taste in the mouth, the beautiful sensations in the body, the wind brushing against the cheek, all the beautiful sights that we have in this present moment, ow!, the ant biting my foot. This has a reality to it that our complicated storyline does not.

Unfortunately, it would seem that we humans cannot live without a story. When we relate to one another, it is our stories that are relating, like two subplots in a novel coming together, influencing each other. It is the stories that relate. A relationship is nothing more than a new story, forming from two, already running, narratives. And yet for many these storylines are what seems to be most important in their life. And it causes all the emotional turmoil, highs as well as lows, that we humans normally live in. 

And this is the question I am asking today: can we live without a story? What would that be like? How would it be, to just be in the present moment? We can respond to the present moment with a tremendous intuition. We don't need that complex story in order to live in this beautiful world. We can trust our intuition. We can trust the moment. We have a deep and ancient wisdom that's embodied. We can feel in our body how to respond to the present moment.

So this is the question, can we live without a story? Perhaps we should try it, bringing our awareness back, again and again, to the present moment, and not putting so much energy into that story, not falling into the trap of believing it to be real. It's a story, and maybe we can never live without it, but perhaps we can. It's worth a try.