The story I tell myself is how I want to see myself and the world, The story I tell others is how I want them to see me and then there is how the things actually are. Stories are interesting and gives meaning to me, you, the sunflower, the stone; by itself everything is just, is. We all, conscious, thinking, feeling beings crave a story, crave a meaning and we are doing or trying to do that since our conceptualization of the self/identity and this world.

Our birth for instance, the story can be a miracle, a good news or a bad news and a burden depending on the meaning associated to the birth by the people involved in the birth. There is the third option of a chance event which is the physical process of fertilization of the egg by the correct sperm without any intention or story behind it. Some math calculation estimating the probability of this chance event’s occurrence 1 in 400 trillion.

For the one who is born, it just happens without one’s intention to be born. One may give meaning to that event as a gift or as a tragedy based on the story that they tell themselves or the story that they want to be associated with. Then there is the option of the possibility of having no meaning for one to be born, to live and to die. The last one is rather grim and wasteful, it makes us feel an existential angst. We are like a lost traveler in a strange land without any knowledge of the destination, goal of the journey and no memory of home if there is any.

How can anyone live with that existential angst of not having a meaning to the existence? Miserably.

So hence comes the meaning, the story of you, me and all of us. The story is taking shape from the birth with the nurture to the nature of an individual and the perception of those by that individual. The perception is essentially the story one tells oneself. It is the understanding of things, it is the truth, a subjective one. It may be influenced and shaped by belief system, faith, religion, spirituality, science, self inquiry and so many others that are considered to be The Answer.

Subjective truths are everywhere, the truth of a hand raise by a student is an initiative for one teacher, the other teacher’s truth is that the hand raise is an interruption while the truth of the student is that they just want to use the washroom. Everyone has their truth, their story. The objective truth is rather boring, its inanimate and lacks meaning, purpose and it just is.

I am a good person. It is a subjective statement and is conditional. I would hurt someone unintentionally and then sleep at night thinking that I am a good person or I may hurt someone fully aware and then give some reason to why I have done that and then sleep at night thinking I am a good person. This proves that there is nothing like a good person or a bad one, we just do things and go along with life by telling and evolving stories of our life.

We all coexist together which means collision of those stories in a cohesive way or a non-cohesive way. When coexisting with others and with yourself, harmony is the smoothest way to go. It is disturbed by the dissonance of the subjective stories and gets stronger with the resonance of the subjective stories, giving it a disguise of an objective truth. The objective truths are harsher and detached like sun is always there in its place and doesn’t rise or set for us to carry on our life and the meaning of life.

Let us now forget that our existence is a chance event and the story you tell yourself about that one event that changed you, may play out completely different in other’s story. We need the story and the meaning to conduct ourselves forward, till we stop existing or whatever it is that happens. We are capable of finding meaning in everything, our resilience and craving for life is so strong that we do find meaning in our most painful experiences as well. We were not given the choice to be born but we are given the choice to have a narrative about the events that unfolded till now and how we want the story to go forward, It will end for us all one day but at least, we can decide what it means before it does.

Now the year 2021 is here, and the only way I see the story going forward from 2020 to 2021 can be previewed as follows:

STOMP STOMP CLAP!

STOMP STOMP CLAP!

WE WILL , WE WILL , ROCK YOU!