#181 Why do you tell stories?
A little over a year ago, I missed a train for the first time ever. It’s really not like me. More often than not, I’m one of the first people to check in to my flight, preferring leisurely reading at an airport to a last-minute scramble.
But a last-minute scramble it was. A classic case of what exhaustion, anxiety and a friend who insists on another pint of beer can do. Oh, and being in a city where you can barely communicate with autowallahs because you don’t speak the local language didn’t help either.
What followed was a few tears for me and a disappointing call for my mother.
Mini non-adventures happen often when you’re travelling. In the moment, they cause a lot of annoyance or a little bit of anxiety, but honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I always come out of these situations with a bag full of stories – or at least events that I can string together into some semblance of a narrative. Which, in my opinion, is what is most important. Stories.
The Significant Objects Project was an experiment about how stories can imbue objects with meaning. The curators scoured garage sales and thrift shops to purchase random cheap objects, creative writers crafted fictitious stories about them (readers were aware they weren’t true), and voila! People were suddenly willing to pay a significantly higher amount of money than the object was really worth. See for yourself.
If you, too, enjoy a good story, maybe you should invest in telling one every now and then. Who knows, maybe someday, somehow, it’ll earn you a pretty penny.
P.S. Let us share our stories with you and your friends. Tell them about us.