Tuck-Pointing

When I was getting ready to start a blog two years ago, I made a point of visited others’ sites and reading some of their material. I saved a few links to return to later. One was John Kobara’s “What is your story? Understanding your narrative and where it is taking you.” From the first sentence, he drew me in: “I have found that people do not appreciate their own stories.”

I’ve noticed this truth in my own life and as I listen to others. Only rarely do I hear a piece of someone’s story without their adding a dismissive, “It’s not important” or “I don’t have anything worth sharing.”

Yet our stories are our lives – the good and the bad, the amazing and the dull. Most of us realize we wouldn’t want life to be all the same, but we seldom value what it actually is – myself included. The ordinary stories are often treasures, yet we relegate them to the folder marked Not Worth Sharing.

My mother and I talk on the phone about a lot of “nothing”: movies we’ve watched, conversations we’ve had, and what’s we’re looking forward to, little stories about friends or silly things we did. None of it is earth-shattering but it helps us stay connected even though we’re a thousand miles apart.

Maybe you do this with someone, too. But what about with someone you see each week (or every day) when they ask, “What’s new?” Do you say, “Oh, nothing”?

A week has 168 hours in it. If it’s true that absolutely nothing happened, could we bear it? Realistically, “nothing” seldom – if ever – happens, right? We’ve just gotten used to not sharing the ordinary stuff of our days.

And that’s a shame.

We’ve trained ourselves to think of the “everyday” as: unremarkable, unexceptional, colorless, humdrum, mundane, unmemorable, prosaic, dull … (and that’s only a few of the synonyms I found!)

Yet, ordinary happenings are the mortar that binds us together. And lately, we’ve been isolating ourselves so much – for a variety of reasons – that we could all do with a bit of tuck-pointing to keep our relationships intact. (I have tuck-pointing on the brain right now. At First Church, we’re into a capital campaign to raise funds for needed structural work – like tuck-pointing, that mending of the grout between brickwork. And I’ve been reminded of how much I like the word.)

I get that not everyone is an introvert, and that’s great. (You’re probably more popular at parties.) Yet there’s something to be said for introspection, particularly for my topic today about knowing your own story. And sharing it.

Most of the people whose stories I hear think theirs is nothing special. They apologize for taking my time and belittle what they’ve said, but I feel like I’ve been blessed as they shared a piece their story.

In college, I took a class on oral history. I was moved by the idea that everyone has stories that are lost when we don’t share them. At the time I was thinking about frontier women or women of the Depression who held their societies together, unnoticed and unthanked, or people whose cultures were disappearing, like that in Appalachia.

Still, it’s not the big stuff that binds us. (As in: where were you when you heard… Kennedy was shot… Challenger exploded… about the bombing of… ?) As momentous as these events are, sharing how we respond to everyday life is what draws us together – like holding a baby for the first time or a friend who just lost the love of her life, like laughing over our mishaps and empathizing over each other’s sorrows. This is a huge part of what life’s supposed to be about. Are you doing it? Are you savoring every bit of what life offers, down to the marrow? And are you gifting others with your bit of the experience?

Only when we’re connected can we do this.

Today marks my one-hundredth blog entry. I’ve been sending these out into cyberspace most weeks, like bread on the water, hoping that they make some small difference in people’s lives.
Thank you for being a part of my story.