Others’ stories add richness to your own life

I‘ve been making the rounds.

This time of year I get invited to speak to a lot of groups at churches, clubs and in homes around the area. It’s all those end-of-the-year banquets and meetings that people are trying to get scheduled and wrapped up so they can move on to summer.

They need a little entertainment, they think about that thing they read in the paper on Monday and they give me a call.

It’s always a lot of fun to do and I love it. The people in the groups are interesting and the food is frequently delicious. There are a lot of good cooks out there and I try to spend as much time as possible around good cooks.

But it’s not just the casseroles, salads and desserts that draw me. It’s more than that.

Every time I walk into one of those rooms, armed with my notes and the columns I’ve been asked to read, I know that when I walk back out, I’ll be carrying more than I brought in with me.

I’m there as a storyteller. I just read things I wrote when I was happy or sad or, sometimes, mad. Other times I share something I heard or saw. But the wonderful thing about stories is that one always leads to another. You can’t tell just one story and stop there. One idea always sparks another idea. One laugh leads to one more. One memory conjures another memory.

I know that when I’m done with my part of the program and the event is over, one by one, people will make their way up to me. They will tell me their own stories.

I especially love that part. I always get far more than I give.

The thing about what I do, about putting down on paper ordinary experiences and day-to-day matters, is that over the years I’ve learned that there is nothing that I can write that a reader can’t match, or top, or turn completely around to make me see from another angle.

And that’s a very important lesson.

Looking at our own lives, it’s hard to get any perspective. It’s like standing so close to the Mona Lisa you can’t see the woman on the canvas. We see the brush strokes and the colors, but we can’t see the big picture.

But when you stand beside someone, when you watch the expressions play across their face or catch the ghost of an old sadness in their eyes, or you listen to the way they laugh at a familiar tale, you fall into their story. Their lives become as real to you as your own.

When that happens to me, I go away richer for the experience.

If I stopped writing, if I quit daydreaming on paper or navigating through life one word at a time, I would miss it terribly. It means the world to me. Storytelling is too deeply ingrained in me. It’s how I was raised; born into a family of narrators, surrounded by people who passed along the tales that were told to them, adding their own biographies as the years passed. That’s where I learned to listen, to find fascination in other lives.

But the best part of what I do is that it gets me out and about. It takes me into conference rooms, down into church basements, into the living rooms of beautiful homes or into crowded downtown restaurants where lunch is being served to busy people who gather each week to learn more about their community. In that way, other lives are woven into mine, and mine into theirs.

Driving home, I think about what was said. And I realize that I am not the same woman who stood up to read a few columns. At the end of the day I am more. So much more.