The Past is Always a Story Told in the Present...

When Did it Start?

I had a hospital appointment on Friday (by phone) and the doctor asked me

When did it start?

I should have been expecting it—it’s a question I’ve been asked over the years by every one of the many practitioners whose help I’ve sought.

This time, though, I answered it differently.

My first response was to laugh—probably not what she’d been expecting!

This appointment had already been a year in the waiting and maybe I was a little out of practice with my story. Perhaps I was taken unawares in the moment, or perhaps her question didn’t make sense to me any more.

My next response was to take a breath and reach into what felt true to me, right there on that call,

Well, I could tell you the story that I’ve been telling myself and others for the last four years, but right now, I don’t know how true it is, I only know it’s the story I’ve been repeating for a while now.

The doctor went quiet, very quiet, and I wondered if this was the first time she’d had anyone say it quite like this.

The Line in the Sand

We did go on and I did relate my ‘story’ and she related her diagnosis, which, no doubt, had been in her mind even before she asked her questions.

It was a helpful conversation in the grand scheme of things and, I guess, my lack of expectations went a long way to it being so.

What was interesting, though, was how clearly it occurred to me that my ‘story’ about something that happened four years ago was only that, a story being re-told in the present.

When I sat with the question anew, in the moment she asked it, I found myself looking back further than ‘the incident’, I found myself wondering how to describe what I couldn’t even remember, let alone relate, or turn into meaning.

And, of course, I could see that I didn’t know the answer. To point to a moment in time at all was to create an arbitrary line in the sand, and to then try and remember what actually happened was impossible, it was always going to be what I had selected to remember, or what had become laid down in the neural tramlines of my memory.

To then attempt to relate how that line looked now, or how the sand before the line might actually have been, years after the metaphorical trip to the beach, was to relate only the pieces that looked relevant now, the pieces that supported the story I had woven into my mind as ‘true’.

If I looked again, I could see different pieces that would support a different story.

Or maybe I was already weaving a different story and the evidence for that story was showing up to support it.

Who knows.

Seeing That We Relate, Not What We Relate

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say ‘one chooses’… …but do I in fact of my own will choose… …or did these images choose me?
Graham Greene, the End of the Affair.

I have slightly butchered the Graham Greene quote to support my thesis so, forgive me for that, but the essence looks true—we pick, or have chosen for us, a moment in time, and we start our story there because that is how it occurs to us.

If I can see this to be true, then I can also see it as true that, starting a different point will lead me to an alternative story. Or (more likely), an alternative story would naturally start at a different point in time.

And, maybe, from an alternative story I will create an alternative experience right now. I might be in pain, or not, when I focus on the moment and not on the story.

And seeing that will surely lead me to take different actions that will lead me to a different future.

Maybe.

And ‘maybe’ is always a hopeful place to start.

With love,

Cathy