Tell me a story
When public transportation works in this city, it works beautifully. When it doesn't work, we riders rarely have the satisfaction of knowing why it's not working, which I think elevates stress levels to fever-pitch. Why was the bus 20 minutes late yesterday? I will never know. When I went to London in 2009, my departing British Airways flight was hours late in arriving to the NY airport, and hours more late in leaving from same. A snow storm had snarled air traffic; fine, we all understood that. But when planes began flying again, planes booked to depart after ours were lifting off first, by several more hours. For which there was no explanation. No communication at all came from the ground crew, in fact, which led to the inevitable Disgruntling of the Passengers. Which is like the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, but perhaps more potentially dangerous. It had been a long long wait already, and the group sense of unfairness - we waited longest, we should go first - kicked in furiously. Complaints were voiced. Still no communication. Why were we not in the air? More storms? Mechanical failure? He Who Must Not Be Named?
As it turned out, the ground crew didn't know why, either, and in their stress, it did not occur to them to say, over the microphone, "We don't know why, and we are upset, too", which would have been much better than avoiding eye contact. I think would have made a huge difference. Give us whatever information you have, tell us the real story, and let us all be in this together.
All went well in the end, and once on board the plane, I had a delightful trip. Whatever the shortcomings of the ground crew, the members of the flight crew were superb. The first thing they did was apologize, and then the captain got on the PA and explained the whole mess. Which did not make my arrival in London any less delayed (I lost, in essence, a full day of my seven days there), but thank you for explaining. Yes. I will fly BA again.
As long as I can remember, knowing why something was so helped me remember and accept that it was so. Why do we shake hands with the right hand? Why, when you are leading a horse, do you traditionally hold the lead in your right hand, but when you have your dog on-leash, the leash is in your left hand? Why should you stop driving when the check-oil light comes on? Why does Mick Jagger sing with a southern drawl? Why does this knowing-why make such a difference?
Because the human brain is a pattern-seeking storyteller. We are hard-wired to ask "why?", "what happened next?" and "what does it mean?". You see a white picket fence. You see a short dog behind it, through the slats. You think, "Dachshund!" But that's only because your wonderful brain has already interpreted what your eyes actually saw - white vertical stripe, shorter dark stripe, white stripe, dark, etc. - and made a pattern and a story out of it, and the story is: Ollie the dachshund is coming to say hello.
Advertisers have always known the value of a story. If you smoked, at some point you had the option of being a cowboy, a person riding on a camel, a liberated woman or pretty near anyone in a 1940s - 1950s movie. The brand you chose probably had something to do with the story you thought you would tell, though not the yet-to-come stories of emphysema and lung cancer and just plain nasty-tasting kisses.
We artists are advised to "build our brand" with story, albeit story that can be distilled down to a sentence or two (which is where I always get stuck), and there are innumerable books about that, some of which grace my bookshelves here. They are among the least-interesting books I own, as they tend to be written by mediocre storytellers - I believe that's called irony - and I'd much rather reread The Wind in the Willows, or Brideshead Revisited. Or the Bible, because if ever a book was full of stories, that's the one. Stories, and stories within stories. The gospels tell the story of Jesus Christ, who himself told stories. A man found a pearl in a field. A widow lost a coin. A rich man died. A father had two sons. Story is a deep and best way to teach and to talk about things too big to be captured with words alone.
If you believe, as I do, that we are all created in the image of God - and please let's not argue about exactly how that worked - then God is also a storyteller who perhaps knows our individual plot twists and resolutions better than we do ourselves. We do not necessarily choose to be aware of this when things are going well, because they're surely going well because we are so clever, efficient, effective, gifted, etc., etc; but when big bad things happen, we are quick to ask "Why? God, why? " Do we get an answer? Sometimes. Does it help? Sometimes. Yet we continue to ask.
Even some nonbelievers ask, if the fall is bad enough. Because there must be a story, and we can't help wanting, needing, crying out to hear it.