Whichever Story I Tell is True
Narratives and omens and choice in navigating changes in life
Mahalo. Thank you, again and most sincerely, for reading what I am writing. Thank you for showing up, for your curiosity, and for your time. If you are not already “subscribed” which means receiving my writing in weekly emails, feel free to enter your email address here:
When I began writing here on Substack in 2022, I thought that writing “memoir” would be a linear process. But as early as essay #3 I found myself going back to explain “what happened before what happens happens.” Then sometimes I felt I needed to jump forward in the narrative, as I did in my reflection on the events of September 11, 2001. Sometimes I interrupted my planned progression with an essay or a current topic that felt pressing and relevant to the memoir, like I am doing today.
I canʻt feel guilty about this. Imagine how it would be if every time we had a memory of the past we had to scroll through every single intervening memory to return to the present moment!
Actually, jumping between your present and my past is the essence of the reader reading the writerʻs memoir. Even if you were there with me for parts of our past, we share a present “now”.
One of the many blessings of having a part of my brain constantly in memoir-writing mode is that I see connections to the transformative times and lessons learned in the past more clearly as they unfold in the way I navigate everyday life in the present. Which brings me to my detour today.
Dear reader, I confess this feels like a big moment, a time of major learning and growth for me, much as the periods I write about in this memoir have been. The past month or so, from the time of the crescent moons to crescent moons again, has brought many changes. Closings and openings and spirals in my personal and professional life. I can feel threads from What Happened Before What Happened Happened which is to say threads from my favorite childhood books, from the list of Four Things I Always Wanted to Do written thirty years ago, from the travels and relationships important during those years, yes I can feel those threads being woven into the newest commitments I make and the relationships I choose to deepen in service to some always sensed but still not perfectly articulated Purpose, Personal Legend, reason for which I took birth.
Sounds a bit grandiose. Put a bit differently though, you might say I still have not quite figured out what I want to be when I grow up, but I think I am getting closer.
Let me pause for a present day orientation to get all my readers and subscribers on the same page, since some of you are friends from thirty (fifty?) years past, and some of you I have never met in person but are here because this writing was recommended to you a week or a month ago. If you google me or check me out on LinkedIn or Facebook, you will discover that I am a real estate broker with Hawaiʻi Life - and that for the past six years I have also led our practice area in Conservation and Legacy Lands.
Much as my 1983 Ph.D dissertation topic “The Environmental Policy of the Mining Firm: An Economic Analysis” read then as an oxymoron, forty years later the idea that the brokerage that sells more luxury properties than any other in Hawaiʻi is also fully and meaningfully committed to ʻāīna protection, to conservation as the final “transaction” for a “property,” should have you raising an eyebrow, commenting below with the emoji of skepticism if not total disbelief. And yet, with memoir-writing time-warping glasses on, doesnʻt one oxymoron make sense of the other? Or at least illustrate some fundamental consistency in the Big Questions with which I am consistently wanting to grapple?
Everyday life (not just mine, yours too I would bet) is full of paradox and ambiguity, complicated relationships and complex decisions. For me those paradoxes and ambiguities and complications and complexities are the fertile ground of creativity and growth. And creativity and growth are signs of robust health, of resilience, of thriving. That is my story, one of many I might have - or you might have - about paradox, ambiguity, complications, and complexity.
Stories are one way of finding clarity.
A key lesson repeated to me in different ways by my human and equine teachers, whether in business/leadership development training or on a trek to remote Tibet, has been that we humans are constantly writing our personal narrative, whether on paper or not, and acting based on it. We are constantly making interpretations and distinctions, consciously or not. Sometimes these stories and conclusions are useful ones and sometimes they are less useful ones than other choices we could make.
The point is that our stories not only guide and inform our choices; the stories themselves are choices.
Stories are how I make sense of knowing that in the beautifully contradictory, dichotomous way of the world, it might equally be true that nothing is really a choice, everything is simply the consequence of my/our past personal choices running into the eddies of circumstances beyond our control - whether those be random, inevitable, or guided by a greater force or forces that we might, depending on our chosen narrative, know as God, or the Tao, or the Ancestors, or the Guides, or the Laws of Physics.
How do we know when it is time to change our story or write new, bolder chapters? How do we close a tired chapter in a bigger story to allow for new chapters to begin? How do we know if we are telling the right story, or at least a believable story, a story to which we are committed, a story that serves our values and valued relationships? How do we know that we are making the right choices, that we are on the right path?
I can answer for myself that I rarely know it intellectually, rationally, although the mind will make up a pretty decent story of explanation after the fact. Those who have been reading these stories of my past know that I learned to trust intuition and guidance, to follow omens, to know the truth of commitment and connection and communication as it lives in the body rather than in mind or words.
Maktub. It is written.
“Traveler, there is no path, you make the path by walking it.”
Both are phrases I have quoted in these pages but juxtapose as seemingly paradoxical statements. Both phrases capture essences I Believe and also Know to be True. Maybe it is something like this. My master equine teacher Zara and I were meant to find each other; that much was written. But the path we took and continue to take together, is a path made by walking it, detouring, getting lost and found again, pausing in frustration, rushing forward without thinking, crossing an ocean, understanding across any barrier of interspecies communication as we gaze into each otherʻs eyes or move bound only by a field of energy and connection as if by magic.
I believe that magic is how great relationships unfold. Especially the relationship you have with Yourself and your Big Story. If by “magic” what I mean is that Truth is found in poetry and art, in intuition and omens, in love, in everything that is larger than my rational mind can hold.
Whichever story I tell is true…but I chose the story that feels like magic.
It is lifted, it is free, it is as it should be.
“The point is that our stories not only guide and inform our choices; the stories themselves are choices.” True dat!
I love this essay