Member-only story

On Reflection

The Simple Truth About the Stories We Tell

And how it is in us to take charge of our future

Nadine Bjursten
On Reflection
Published in
5 min readApr 29, 2024

--

Photo by Rosie Sun on Unsplash

Of all the quotes about hope and despair out there, Maira Kalman’s captures my current mood: “We hope. We despair. We hope. We despair. That is what governs us. We have a bipolar system.”

I exhaust myself worrying about what kind of future my girls will have, and maybe that’s why I recently pulled Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark from the shelf, hoping to tip the scales in hope’s favor. She wrote it during the Iraq war but given what has been happening in the Middle East, it seemed the perfect choice.

“Every conflict is, in part, a battle of the story we tell,” Solnit writes.

I thought of all the stories we tell ourselves, and more, the stories we are told every day. These stories target our emotions and make us vote, eat, buy, and see the world in a certain way. And the storytellers are masters at their craft: Many people vote against their interests, eat food that doesn’t make them healthier, buy items they won’t use, and consume media that doesn’t inform or enrich.

When Solnit wrote this collection of essays, I was working at a foreign policy journal in Washington, DC, focused on arms control and disarmament. The Bush administration had…

--

--

On Reflection
On Reflection

Published in On Reflection

“The only journey is the one within.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

Responses (4)