An Excerpt from Storycatcher

Chapter Five:

Riding Experience to Wisdom: The Map of a Story-Based Life

This material is edited from a much longer chapter with hopes it will intrigue you to discover the fullness of the book, Storycatcher, Making Sense of our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story, by Christina Baldwin. Each chapter is carried by a tale about people, family, or community, intertwined with philosophical and practical instruction about the nature of story, how it works and how we can practice it in our lives. The Storycatcher reading group guidelines show the list of questions that appears at the end of each chapter.

I was trying not to cry, my brother wasn't crying and this was, after all, his farewell more than mine. The plane was loaded, and the instructions for takeoff had begun. He was in uniform, and so was I: his was the uniform of the U.S. Army, mine was the uniform of the American peacenik, both of us vintage 1968. In August, two months earlier, I had moved to San Francisco to work with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker-based social service organization, and my first job out of college. My brother, Carl, had just graduated from boot camp and was heading to Oakland to ship out for Viet Nam. We had both ended up in Minneapolis for a weekend's leave, and the remaining family — my parents, our younger sister and brother — had brought us to the airport to see us off.

. . .

This scene is a turning point in the story of my brother's life and mine. While we are in the scene, we cannot see the scene. We are living raw experience. In the moment, we haven't had time or distance enough to make story. Soon this capacity to turn experience into words will click in: we will begin to think in narrative. We will begin to link this scene to what has gone before and to what we anticipate coming next: we will put what's happening in context. We will decide the importance of the moment and what our choices are. We will do what human beings do: mix experience and story together in a swirl that is part reality and part what we are making out of reality while it's happening to us.

Looking back this moment becomes a teaching tale for how we live with experience and ride it down to wisdom.

. . .

The year 1968 was a watershed for the boomer generation. It has become an icon year, even for those older, younger, or not yet born — the year things happened. In her book, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation, Annie Gottlieb intersperses interviews with hundreds of members of this generation with her own threads of perception — her own spiral of experience. She calls 1968 "the second great turning point of the Sixties."

We engage the spiral of experience when something happens to shake up the status quo of our lives. We may not even fully know why, but our senses come alert, adrenaline rushes through our bodies. Depending on what's happening we come fully present in delight, watchfulness, surprise, or trauma. We enter a long process, a learning curve.

After the initiating event, we begin responding. Coping mechanisms set in: we may have the urge to tell somebody what's happening — like Carl calling me on the phone — trying to stake out some semblance of order by saying it out loud. Or we may head to the journal or write a letter. "Normalcy" continues on around us, but we are in a space apart: our world seems suddenly set on its end. Depending on the circumstances, we may be shocked, surprised, delighted; we may feel hypersensitive to emotions, or we may stop registering emotions.

. . .

When he'd gotten the draft notice, Carl had had only a few weeks to consider his options. He didn't want to kill anyone; he didn't want to go to jail. He adamantly refused to adopt anyone else's values, even if he hadn't fully formulated his own. This became his point of honor: he would let the Army take him, but he would not let the Army make him into anybody he was not.

Though we may feel isolated, we do not enter the spiral journey alone. Life events happen in a community of context and have repercussions both for the ones most directly involved and for the people surrounding them. We are tracking the catalytic change; people are tracking us. Every soldier has somebody wondering how they are.

Arriving at a momentary resting point, story clicks in to articulate the new status quo — Carl begins to reflect. He looks around with beginner's mind: questioning, noticing, wanting to have his own direct experience. Reflection is the first step in making sense; reflection elicits the first level of story.

. . .

What emerges in these first layers of story is the survivor's tale. In the survivor's tale, we work with an experience to a point where we can begin to reclaim our sense of self as one who now includes this changed circumstance. We come up with two layers of explanation: one that is usually casual and social and another that is more intimate and honest. We look for reassurance that we are still part of the bigger story, that others have gone through this and left us their maps of story. We lay tracks for making our own way through. We may find support groups, formal and informal, and form meaningful bonds with others living through similar experiences. The survivor's tale proclaims a level of confidence: we're alive on this side of a major event, we are restabilizing, everything is going to be okay. We work to make our experience manageable.

. . .

In working with the spiral of experience, significant moments come back around again and again, allowing us to harvest insight. Every time this cycle recurs, we have the opportunity to reflect and articulate the still unexplored territory of our stories. As we live inside the integration story, our experience becomes less urgent and more philosophical. We may speak of it less often, but it rises up in us when there is space and receptivity.

We become ourselves based on a combination of life events and how we respond to them and how we make story of them. There is one more spin to the spiral. Not every experience takes us there, but the most life-changing experiences eventually lead us to the story of insight and meaning. At this depth we are able to see our most significant experiences as transformers. They anoint us with a sense of completion and release.

"So what do you think now," I asked him, "how do you see Viet Nam influencing your life over the years?"

"As much as I bucked it, the Army got me over the bridge from drifting along as a school dropout to coming home with a sense that life was something I should be taking care of. It made me a more tolerant person. After a year in Viet Nam I know I can put up with anything, that I can find a way to live with anybody, that there are good people in every situation, and that there are good people on every side of an issue. The war made me more skeptical and more faithful. I've never been deeply religious, but I have a kind of spirituality that is based on love for life."

. . .

When the traveling version of the Memorial Wall came through Minnesota, Carl and his wife Colleen went to see it. "There was a map of the country and I was showing Colleen where Long Bihn was, and where I thought I might have been up country...This passerby overheard us and reached out to shake my hand. 'Thanks for going,' he said.

"I told him, 'You're not looking at a volunteer here, I was drafted into that...'

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Tell Me This Story: Your Opportunity to
Share Your Story

We all have moments in our lives when we find our depth. Reflection on those times helps to create a story that defines how we live our lives. The responsibility of a Storycatcher is to use the spiral of story and experience to add insight and meaning to our life events. The deeper the story we're willing to carry, the more we can recognize wisdom in our lives and the lives of those around us.

What event or experience in your life have you ridden to wisdom?
Let's start there.
Tell me that story.

Click here to respond to this question with a story from your own life >>