To (re)story or not?

Perhaps this is the wrong question...

An unedited and condensed image from one of our latest shoots. As I explored imagery for this article, it really felt about right.

Over the last few years, I’ve read or interacted with a sizeable body of content about the stories we tell. Often, this is situated within the context of claims that we need new stories to live by; stories that ground our being, doing and becoming in ‘right (dynamic) relation’ to reality.

*I’ve been one of those people, basically claiming that our relation to ‘reality’ is—at some important level—a story of sorts, and that the stories we have largely implicitly internalised are harmful (and at something like the ‘root’ of the ‘metacrisis’) and that we have to live the work of re-storying (going towards the stories of today, exploring them, picking them apart, imagining new possibilities, living those possibilities in different ways, and telling stories of that process about that process in order to influence the overall process. A wee but meta, eh?!!!).

I’ve also seen a lot of push back against this (as a general notion).

Now, each of these claims comes with its nuances. Each of these claims is inevitably influenced by the historicity of the person making them (which of courses means the broader agent - arena relations at play). Because of this, I don’t see all of these claims as being the same or equal. They are same same, but of course different.

And I should say, as per the above about my historical relation to such ideas, it’s always changing. I cannot tell you how odd, scary, refreshing, and enlivening it is to look back on myself a year (or five!) ago and think, “Wow! I’ve come a long way.”

So what I’d like to do is, especially given the series

Jessica Böhme

and I are working on (more to come on that soon), flip the script a little. I’d like to suggest that what we need is not a living process of re-storying per se (recognising this will of course play a role, perhaps a near leading one on occasion), but rather a deepening of our living (and loving) relation to the process of wisdom seeking. We need to re-philosophy.

Now, I think of philosophy as something like an existential stance of sorts. A living commitment to exploring what it means to be you, what it means to live in this world, and what it means to be an expression of some kind of seemingly creative(ish) universal process (along with all this might entail in terms of responsibility and all manner of topics). It terrifies and enlivens. It confronts and inspires. It regresses and progresses. It divides and unifies. It, the living process I refer to, can do all of this and so much more.

None of this is to suggest that what we’ve come to think of as professional philosophy isn’t core / crucial to the overall process I refer to. But this itself would require more than one short article, so I’ll skip for now.

What I’ll instead do, before switching off for the evening to make dinner, play with my daughter and enjoy a little CNS down time, is ask you to consider a few questions:

• What is your relationship like to your ‘self’ (past, ‘current’, future)?

• What is your relationship like to your family?

• What is your relationship like to your community, commons or even country?

• What is your relationship like to ‘culture’, or better yet, ‘civilisation’?

• What is your relationship like to the biosphere and all that we refer to as living and non-living things?

• What is your relationship like to the cosmos?

• How do you fit into all of this? What possibilities does this afford you? How capable do you feel in exploring and realising some of said possibilities?

In some ways these are very basic questions. There is no one ‘right’ way to explore how you might answer, break down, reframe or expand. But… Are you really living these questions? I mean, are you deliberatively engaged in the process of expliciting a (working) ‘worldview’? How aligned are your ways of being, doing and becoming to the (working) worldview you’ve explicated?

*Note that this process I refer to will seem like a luxury of the few. There are a million potentially valid reasons to suggest that. But I’m not in the camp of agreeing with this in the binary. That’s another exploration, however.

It’s my belief, if I am to frame it this way, that a deepening connection (or re-connection?) to such a process might well be a big part of what we most need in order to really facilitate the type of transformation so many refer to (at all the ‘levels’), which is the context within which re-storying is most often situated.

Because of that, I’m going to spend a little more time exploring this on this channel.

If you find it useful, please join in.

With love as always.