This is Why We Need Storytellers More than Ever
“Stories are a communal currency of humanity.” — Tahir Shah
A few years back at the Sundance Film Festival, screenwriter and director Taylor Sheridan was greeted with loud applause as he walked on stage to discuss his film, Wind River.
“Why you do it,” he said, gesturing to the audience.
The life of an artist is seldom filled with the same emphatic confirmation that what we do matters. Those who have a more delicate relationship with the world and are willing to share their fragilities through expression must cling to their sense of “why” stronger than any other profession.
But when those fleeting moments arrive and remind us there’s no place we’re supposed to be other than on a stage, behind a keyboard, or staring blankly onto a canvas, there is no doubt the life of a storyteller is an essential one.
I recall two times when either I, or someone in the same theater was so moved by a piece of storytelling it was clear their life would never be the same.
Just a few months after arriving in New York City bright-eyed and ready to take on the world, I saw one of my favorite stage actors perform in a play called, Frost/Nixon.
There’s a scene in the play where Nixon displays a rare vulnerability, stumbling through a drunken rant about how he’s misunderstood and hellbent on not allowing Watergate to be his downfall.
As the spotlight dimmed and Frank Langella faded into the wings, an elderly woman in front of me was so stirred by his words she couldn’t help but utter her own.
“Beautiful,” I heard her whisper.
I want to move people the same way,” I thought.
Just two years later, I went to see a film called, La Mission. The film is about a macho ex-convict who can’t accept the fact his son his gay.
At the film’s conclusion, the director fielded questions to a packed house. The gentlemen sitting behind me was in tears as he muscled out the words, “As the father of a gay Latino son I want to thank you for making this film. It’s so important we tell these stories.”
There were many other accounts that left me with no doubt the work of a storyteller, however thankless, might be the most important for our survival. And no one expressed this sentiment better than our ancestors.
There were tribes in Africa that passed on traditions without writing down a word, which meant failure to listen with your soul meant you would literally forget where you came from.
The ancient Greeks believed their words held up the pillars of the universe and that if you didn’t speak with enough passion and vitality the universe would collapse.
Or how about the hundreds of cave paintings found in Motignac, France that date back more than 17,000 years?
Stories. Stories. Stories.
I love what Academy-Award winning actress Geraldine Page once said about the importance of listening — truly listening.
“If we could only listen to each other on the stage like the animals in the forests do — as though our lives depended on it.”
What if instead of burying our faces in touchscreens, or blocking out the world with earphones we communicated with the same intent to better understand?
We need storytellers today more than ever. It seems tolerance has been abandoned out of fear, spirited debate muddied into inflexible waters, and the unfamiliar interpreted as inadequate.
We forget that just because something offends us it doesn’t mean we’re right.
Telling truthful stories demands a rare and delicate vulnerability that encourages questions, introspection, and compassion.
We’ve lost patience with one another, swapped community for screens, starved real connection, and misinterpreted hearing with true listening.
But to listen to someone is to show a reverence for their soul. We’re saying, however briefly, “I see you.”
We tell stories because they inform us about the people who came before — how they thought, felt, and loved. And in the process we can take a strange solace that they too wrestled with the same frailties, flaws, and focus.
We tell stories to inform us of who we were, are, and more importantly who we can still become.
We tell stories to ease our loneliness. To remind ourselves that we belong. That no matter what we’re going through someone somewhere understands.
We tell stories so we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.
In other words, in a time when we are drowning in information, we are ironically, starving for wisdom.
And so we turn to stories to illuminate important life lessons and remind us of all we don’t know.
Stories are as an integral part of life as the air you breathe. Even in our state of rest we subconsciously interpret the world through tales that dance in our heads until we rise the following day.
Listen to what Irish poet John O’Donohue says about dreams:
“The Ancient Greeks believed that when you dreamed at night, the figures of your dreams were characters who left your body, went out into the world, and undertook their own adventures; they then returned before you awoke.”
Being a storyteller is our natural state because telling stories is another way of expressing our humanity.
That I think, is what the world needs desperately, now more than ever.
