The Stories we all Live, Make and Tell — Together
We can all talk and pontificate about problems, strategies, methods and processes until we’re red-or-blue-in-the-face…
And we do…
Things become raw and real, when spirited, poignant life stories emerge and unravel… telling it like it was…like it is…like it could be…
The stories bring it all to life.
They touch our hearts and our souls.
We laugh…we cry…we rage…we grieve…we celebrate…we heal…we dream…
We feel…
Stories give shape, meaning and purpose…
Stories combine rhyme and reason…
Some stories help us make sense…
Some don’t seem to make any sense at all…
When we share the stuff we hold deep inside…the stuff that tears at us…the stuff we hold dear…we can shift…
Sharing stuff helps us get unstuck…
Stories are timeless. They are passed along and down. They are our history…our present tense and sense of reality …and they can also be(come) our future…
Whatever we personally think, believe and advocate — influenced by our own feelings and lived experience — we continue to choose pathways (consciously and/or unconsciously) that emanate from our own ongoing lived experience.
Our stories (can) connect us…bridge the divides…
They (can) blur the (artificial) lines that separate us.
They (can) give us a reason to keep on, to keep going…together…
Our stories can also continue to divide us…prop up false narratives…box us into chunked down versions of ourselves — limiting our possibilities.
The Industrial Age conditioned (many of ) us to slot things into compartments that don’t (quite) fit real nuanced messy complex gritty life, lives and transcontextual realities.
Sometimes it seems that our contrived need to package up our positions on any topic, on the state of the world — to slot and categorically categorize — to find meaning and make sense of meaninglessness and senselessness — just deepens the divides.
The old story of separation clings…(still) keeps us (many of us) hooked in insidious ways…
The story of separation that artificially disconnected us from one another, nature and all living beings, also separated (dis-integrated) us from our whole selves. When we wall off or push down aspects of our messy humanness (feelings), we also experience and observe unintended consequences. Our stories, the narratives we tell ourselves and pass along to influence and bolster our positions…often divide, polarize, distort and conflate…
Not being swept into more binary seesaw narratives of separation — despair nor delusion — is a challenge.
Holding the profound disquiet, discomfort and bottomless depth of hurt — in our darkest moments, is strangely also full of life, love and possibilities…
Stories matter. Stories are often messy. Stories are layered, interlaced and interconnected with many stories…shapeshifting into story narratives.
Stories influence the creation of brands, origin stories, brand marketing and communication and brand image etc. Perhaps brands — the felt (and real) need to brand and branding are at times a perpetuation of the compartmentalization, competition and consumerism that keep some of the old stories of separation grinding forward?
Unavoidable? It doesn’t have to be. Branding can play an important role as a force-for-good helping to ‘promote’ life-affirming stories about choices, ‘products’ and ‘services’ that add meaningful purpose in society — for people and a living planet.
…Lets be mindful that stories and storytelling came long before the existence of brands and branding. Let’s be ever vigilant of the insidious ways that modernity has extracted, twisted and co-opted some of the deeper, wider meanings of story (and other terms) to serve narrower interests. Let’s consider the shadow side of brands that slide into labelling and the branding that can (inadvertently) reinforce dysfunctional polarization and (artificial) divides.
Stories are permeable, dynamic and changeable. They can contain and reflect complexity. Stories can hold the inherent tension of paradox.
New stories are being birthed and (more) are ready to be born…
Life stories…history…his stories…her stories…our stories…their stories…future stories:
What happens if we:
📚 (Begin to) stir them together?
📚 Melt down the catchy slogans that (continue to) draw us in…as we draw our (dividing) lines?
📚 Straddle it all somehow?
📚 Let go of (some of) our need to be so right and the need to hold onto illusory control in the face of uncertainty?
📚 Hang in with the discomfort of “I don’t knowness?”
📚 Hold open many ways of knowing?
📚 Accept the existential soup that contains and surrounds us all, in order to allow wisdom to permeate and guide us, helping us live into life-affirming regenerative ways of being that might shift the trajectory?
Maybe we gotta ask, how are we:
📚 (Unintentionally) keeping dysfunctional narratives of separation alive?
📚 Still trapped by the sticky threads of a paradigm that (we think) we’ve shed?
📚 Feeding it — still?
📚 Blinded and blind-sided by our own blind spots?
📚 Allowing our own dissonance to live on?
As we ask and live the questions — so many questions — in the (harsh) light of day, can we (try to) do so with unrelenting curiosity, (abundance of) compassion and (tough) love in our hearts?
What kind of future hiSTORY do we want to live, make and tell?
As we (increasingly) face what is going on in our lives and in a world pulled apart by escalating crises — our feelings can be overwhelming. When we let ourselves feel, when we feel our hearts breaking under the weight of it all:
📚 How do we process our experience?
📚 What choices are we making?
📚 What stories and narratives are we carrying forward?
There are also many blossoming life affirming stories, rich with the spirit of abundance, that still fail to draw mainstream attention. There are aspirational and practical context-based and place-sourced pathways that make common[s] sense under any scenario of unfolding events.
We all have stories. Our unstitutional journey from the commons space between, also reflects a proliferation of stories to share from the past few years…many that continue to roll forward…layered, nuanced and overlapping…
Some stories are little jewel-like examples that capture big ‘aha’ moments.
They depict a colourful slice along the pathways of our unwavering spUNky game-be-that’s-not-a-game — life.
Many of our stories illustrate what being unstitutional is all about — in living colourful activation, with so many amazing ordinary, extraordinary people collectively engaged in a paradoxical dance of emergence and strategy.
Storymaking doesn’t wait…we co-create…
As we work to shape new pathways forward — we don’t wait for the stories to surface. We make them as we go along. We proactively search them out, often from the hazy periphery, co-discovering and amplifying them.
Sometimes described as narrative landscaping…new stories are being conceived and shaped with intentionality and some courage. Isn’t that what creating the new story is all about?
Multitudes of stories…
The stories are interwoven into a vibrant tapestry that inspire and invite many more people to engage and share in the living, making and the telling.
Story living, making and telling adds depth, spice and flavour…made richer as we craft, concoct, co-create, combine and exchange…
Some of us are natural storytellers. We are captivated and connected by the stories we share with our collaborators and those we hear from all around the world.
Sometimes we’re holding stories that we don’t even know are there…
Sometimes the stories are buried deep within — where truth and reality burn from within, failing to emerge and flow.
Sometimes the stories have been there forever, hiding in plain sight, lost in the white noise — forgotten, shelved or ignored.
Many stories of marginalization, dehumanization, trauma and colonization swept aside and left to fester in the shadows — live on with devastating consequences. As these stories live on, they dig deeper holes in our souls and psyches. They widen the chasms. They leave our deep longing for belongingness stranded and unfulfilled.
Decolonizing potentially liberates us ALL from the myths and stories that dehumanize, degenerate and denigrate what is sacred about life.
When faced, experienced, shared and accepted, the stories of moral injury can potentially become stories of moral imagination…
Sometimes the stories are fresh and new, co-created, expanded in the telling, stretched and shaped in the living.
Powerful stuff.
When we tell and share our stories about the monsters we’ve known and loved (or not,) our inherent messy humanness, the highs and lows, the ups and downs and the unending twisty bumpy roads — we discover our common ground.
Staying stuck or trapped in dysfunctional systems…sliding or spiralling into dystopian narratives increasingly becomes unbearably unthinkable.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
― J. Krishnamurti
Unacceptable. Unbearable. All the while we gotta keep asking, who’s bearing the weight and suffering the greatest brunt of engrained dysfunctional patterns and recurring scripts that keep old stories of separation on repeat/rewind.
The near-impossible can compellingly become unimpossible when we feel personal and collective coherent agency to take healthy, positive steps — big and small.
Instead of tip-toeing gingerly around the tough issues, sharing and listening to stories can help us excavate more deeply, courageously owning our own experience and the need to process and integrate what we’re learning. In doing so, more of us may feel welcomed to delve a little more authentically as well.
The result is a gift we give ourselves and share with others. This kind of inner work is so important to heal ourselves and our relationships.
May we all learn how to listen to that inner voice, gain awareness and reach out to others to build bridges to greater understanding and healing.
Things can (will) generally become (more) figureoutable as we (more of us in more places and spaces) creatively engage — not as grand sweeping global prescribed wraparound solutions that invariably fall short or fail.
The observations, reflections, learnings and implications can become demonstrations that help us all mindfully and meaningfully move forward, shaping new narratives.
Some stories will become case studies that teach us about patterns — where we fail and where we can fly.
Some stories can help us shift from apathy to positive impact.
They can point the way — how to head in the roughly right direction making tangible progress, reaching for new possibilities…recovering some of what we lost along the way…
The stories that contribute to case studies contain qualitative and quantitative data. The qualitative stuff, sometimes called soft or warm data, is often the most telling and compelling of all.
We gotta pay attention to the humanness stuff — where realities are faced and possibilities can actualize and come to life.
When we ignore or downplay the human (system) stuff…the fullness of living system stuff — it bites us in the ass…again and again!
Right?
It’s about time we put all that solid social science research and knowledge to good practical use. It’s high time we honour (and restore) longstanding Indigenous wisdom- ways of knowing and not knowing and the mystery of unknowing that so many of us lost along the way.
The time for serious SHfT, life-affirming activation and narratives is now — as if the future of humanity depends on it — because it does.
Everywhere we look – deep within and out there – we realize how our rootedness to life has been distorted and decontextualized by Industrial Age fragmentation. Yet being (fully) human is a heartbeat away from our Indigeneity, inextricably interconnected to all living beings and beingness. With each story shared, we’re reminded that every living moment offers a choice to embody the essence of our (re)awakened regenerative spirits and souls.
As we take stock of the multitudes of stories and learnings we’re collectively accumulating, we sometimes surprise ourselves. So busy working…we don’t realize the full breadth and depth of all that we are unearthing and integrating toward coherent sense making and adaptable, accessible application.
In essence, stories can widen our lens, equip us to navigate more wisely and well, help us develop individually and together — (inter)becoming in service to humanity and all life.
Our ongoing action research — living lab learning-in-action — helps us gain (trans)contextual insights as we engage, relate, observe and reflect, drawing from the threads of our individual and combined lived experiences, unstitutionally defining, forging and adapting life-affirming pathways.
We’ll continue to share insights and ‘aha’ moments as our collaborative commons work unfolds and evolves.
📚 What stories have you been holding dear?
📚 What stories do you wish you could release and set free?
📚 What stories are waiting for you — that you can help bring to life in ways that simultaneously embody your creative uniqueness and connectedness to the sacredness of life?
With deep SHfT underway, the new stories, storylines and overlapping themes hold unlimited space and potential for any and all of us to make meaningful progress. Together, we are filling-in-the-blanks, imagining new life chapters, considering scenarios, designing alternative life and work landscapes, making and testing new choices — being the change we hold in our heads, hearts and hands by being our stories-in-progress, as they blossom and unfold.
New stories emerge along with the pathways formed, informed by nonlinear strategy and systems-thinking while honouring knowledge, ways of knowing and wisdom traditions that have withstood the test of time. Facing the biggest challenges of our time, our best hope is to embody futures literacy, advancing our hopeful stories — accessing our collective humanness spirit, creativity and joyfulness as resilience.
This article was updated April 2024, reflecting additional perspectives and ongoing action research, as we continue to observe, listen and adapt — a humbling learning journey for us all.
Unstitution was birthed as a collective creative commons and nested ecosystem. We (co-)catalyze and support collaborative communities, initiatives and coalitions where people from across sectors, disciplines, cultures, generations and walks-of-life work together on mission critical issues. From readiness through to regenerative progress — moving beyond polarization — is how we roll. The links embedded throughout this article are a warm invitation to go a bit deeper, at any time. For more insights reflecting our ongoing journey, our suite of Unstitution articles are published on Medium. They portray a small sample of the ways we are adapting and contributing among ever-expanding commons-based communities and initiatives inspired and fuelled by citizens — perhaps better described as denizens — anywhere in the world — living into the principles and spirit that govern our collaborative work.
You can follow Unstitution and engage with us on LinkedIn. Many of our posts and perspectives also pop up under hashtags #messyhumanness and #wisdomwithteeth.
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