Kent, Open Book, 1938
We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us
to love or to hate, to see or to be blind. Often, too often, stories saddle us,
ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning.
The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question
them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then to become the
storyteller.
Everyone has stories of the small coincidence by which their
parents met or their grandmother was saved from fire or their grandfather from
the grenade, of the choice made by the most whimsical means that led to
everything else, whether you're blessed or cursed or both. Trace it back far
enough and this very moment in your life becomes a rare species, the result of
a strange evolution, a butterfly that should already be extinct and survives by
the inexplicabilities we call coincidence. The word is often used to mean the
accidental but literally means to fall together. The patterns of our lives come
from those things that do not drift apart but move together for a little while,
like dancers.
Rebecca Solnit
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