Truth Or Storytelling

A few days ago, the award winning movie director, Oliver Stone made a statement that really made me start to think. He said, “We don’t know what the dialog really was, so we fill in the blanks the way we think it should have been!” I’ve been told that my God sometimes speaks the same words to several, but each finds a different meaning in those same words. I believe words are given to us as starting points, and then we are to digest those words in our hearts and then use them as each heart sees them. Something that has surprised me is; how often I can go back and reread my older essays and find new meaning in them, an entirely different meaning than I originally planned. Throughout our world, we still can find tribes that have no written history. Their history is passed down by “Storytellers.” I have never heard them referred to as historians. Could it be that history always looks better with a little embellishment? In all wars, all religions, in life in general there is always two rights and two wrongs. It always depends upon which side you are on! Even your belief! Could it be that quite often we have to bend reality to make it sound right? One time, when talking about life, Steve Jobs said “Sometimes we don’t know how to push the right key.” I might add, sometimes we can’t find that “right key!” Sometimes we must rethink the margins of our pages so that we leave room for our side notes. Often we find those side notes to be the most important part of our writing! That is the place we rethink all we have written. I look upon all religions as storytelling. Even though, most will tell you that they believe their “Holy Book” to be the word of God. I can’t remember ever being told that they know it to be God’s word! We must remember most have been translated from hearsay. And we all know that man has a history of controlling facts to fit his beliefs, of filling in the blanks. The way he thought it should have been done! And, most of us want to fill in those blanks our way! The more thought I give to my deciding what is truth and what is storytelling is something like a juggling act. Truth is what each of us feels in our own heart. Storytelling is what most of us has learned to accept as truth. Each of us must decide what is right for us.