A HUMAN STORY
We Are the Stories We Tell
Why do humans tell stories?
This question came to me again during my morning pages.
Why do we need stories?
What is it that makes us long to hear and to share stories.
Perhaps it is because we are stories ourselves.
Every human being is a story still being written.
We carry within us the stories of where we come from, what has happened to us, what we have loved, what we have lost, what we believe and who we are still becoming.
Life does not arrive neatly arranged. It comes to us in fragments—sensations, encounters, accidents, memories, joys and losses.
Through story, we gather those fragments and create some continuity between the person we were, the person we are and the person we seek to become.
Humans tell stories to remember, to imagine, to belong and to make meaning to their life.
Stories also allow us to enter lives that are not our own.
Through them, we can experience fear, love, betrayal, courage, danger and moral choice without having to live every possible life ourselves.
A story can carry us across the distance between one consciousness and another.
It can remind us that our brief experience of being alive is not ours alone.
But stories are powerful precisely because they shape how we see ourselves and one another.
They can free us and they can also imprison us.
A person may live inside a story of failure, shame, victimhood, superiority or destiny.
A nation may live inside a story about who belongs and who does not.
Power does not control people through money or violence alone.
It also controls people by shaping the stories of what is normal, necessary, successful or true.
So the question is not only why we tell stories.
It is also: what stories are we choosing to tell?
Are our stories here to connect us or divide us?
Do they awaken us, or keep us asleep, angry and afraid ?
We are responsible for the stories we carry inside of us and share with the world
Our individual stories become part of a larger, shared human story.
Together, they can deepen fear and separation, or they can open understanding, compassion and connection.
And here is where art enters.
Every artwork is evidence that someone was here, saw the world in a particular way and felt compelled to leave a trace.
An artist takes something lived, remembered, imagined, feared or desired and gives it life.
A painting, a sculpture, a photograph an installation becomes a way of saying: this is what I saw; this is what I felt; this is what I could not forget.
Yet the work does not end with the artist.
The viewer arrives carrying another life, another memory, another story.
The same artwork may awaken grief in one person, recognition in another, discomfort in someone else, or a part of us that has long remained silent.
Perhaps this is what art does at its deepest level.
It allows one human story to meet another.
It crosses the distance between us.
It wakes something within us.
Over the coming months, A HUMAN STORY will look at the stories we inherit, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories society asks us to believe and the stories artists place before us.
What stories shape us?
Which ones no longer serve us?
Who controls the stories of our time?
And what can art reveal that words alone cannot?
We are the stories we tell.
Our stories become the human story.
The responsibility is ours: to tell them in ways that unite rather than divide, that awaken rather than numb, and that help us recognise something of ourselves in one another.