Let Us Pick Up the Stones Over Which We Stumble, and Build Altars.
Stories create the fabric of our reality. Stripping away personal narratives can lead to a more universal understanding and connection.
Hi,
How are you this week? What did you see in the eyes of the stranger who passed by on the street?
"When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
It’s been seven years, now that I counted, since I sat with myself and, upon examination, realised the thievish influence stories had on me, and on my capacity to experience emotions. And how unskilled I was in handling them.
At that time, I had recently lost my partner to a heart attack, and I’d been a year or so into depression, which was yet to stay with me, continuing its teaching for five more years to come. I just turned twenty, and before I got a chance to construct myself well, I was already looking at the pieces of the scaffolding scattered across the floor. I suppose I was lucky in this sense. I think that saved me.
Until much later, I didn’t have the financial means to find help through therapy and medications, so I did what I could, and had to, to keep myself in this world, and sane. Every evening, after work, I would go to the bank of the river and sit in silence, looking deep, deep inwards, seeking the roots of the pain and fear that seemed to be steadfastly overtaking my whole being and swallowing everything around it as well.
And as I sat and looked, I realised there was almost no room inside of me to breathe. I was so full of stories that I became incapable of experiencing my emotions in their pure form. I tried determining to what extent the emotions that I experienced daily were truly mine and inherent to the condition of being a human, and to which extent they were a second-hand product of the external narratives I’ve been fed with, and then learned to eat willingly, from the day I was born. I couldn’t tell.
I’ve realised I never knew what I really was, because I’ve never looked beyond those stories. I only had an idea of it. All the stories I absorbed participated diligently in kneading the narrative of “my self”, which kept me confined in the separateness and suffering of my own making. I’ve never been taught, like so many of us, how to engage with these narratives skilfully, and safely. The art of self-preservation and self-purification of the excess is unknown to most of us, and so many fall victim to the unfamiliarity of it.
Having arrived at such a conclusion, I decided to strip my life bare of all the stories I was able to eliminate. I wanted to find out how much of my mind’s narrative could be removed. I wanted to touch my emotions raw and naked, and for that, I had to become raw and naked, too.
For over a year, I stopped listening to lyrical music, watching films, or reading novels. I’ve begun the process of downsizing and simplifying my life (still ongoing) to limit the narrative of material objects around me. I’ve quit alcohol, to face reality as it is without distortions other than those already applied by my thinking mind. Finally, I limited my social engagements and did my best to fight off the urges to patch up the emotional discomfort with human connections.
After a year and a half, I stood before myself raw and naked enough to slowly begin dissecting my natural emotional states from the excessive stories that swelled up in me over the years of unaware accumulation.
Since then, I have continued to engage in practices aimed at dismantling the careful architecture of my inner story. Life has undeniably become more straightforwardly joyous, peaceful and simple. And yet, I still get lost.
We live in isolation of our individual stories
Our stories serve multiple purposes. And there are many ways in which they shape our reality.
Some work through us to build expectations and preferences. We often mistake our preferences for genuine needs and grow attached to them, which makes us unhappy because life isn’t meant to always cater to those. These stories also prevent us from enjoying our lives as they are, in any given moment.
Then, there are stories that cause us to mistake living for doing. The praise of efficiency, hustle, optimisation, personal achievements, wealth accumulation. We lose the grip of our worth inherent to the life flowing within us, and we grow to believe that unless we do, we cannot be. Which, of course, is the other way around.
We also live through stories that place and keep us hostage in spaces detrimental to us. I’ve stayed in relationships that were hurtful and abusive because the story I was telling myself prevented me from seeing things clearly as they were. Many of us do.
Our understanding and reaction to our emotions are, too, profoundly influenced by the stories we construct around them. When we experience anger, for instance, it often results from the ideas our story offers, rather than actual events. Similarly, in moments of sadness, we forget that a large part of this emotion is generated by the story surrounding the event which was against our liking. Delving on those, we grow hungry for vengeance or reparation, further entrenching ourselves in our views. This narrative process shapes a binary world of 'us' against 'them'.
Our individual stories nurture our sense of separation from the world and all beings, making us forget the interdependence and interconnectedness that our existence is submerged in. Such narratives can also make us feel more isolated than we actually are. They can convince us we’re alone and that nobody understands us, while the narrative itself builds the very wall that makes us feel separated and lonely.
Ultimately, the story is an architecture we construct around our being. They are the many lines of walls that keep us separated not only from other beings, but from life itself: from the very moment we exist in.
I sometimes think of them as resembling a matryoshka doll, which I used to play with as a child. The outer layer is what we perceive ourselves to be in our most immediate thought. Upon removing this shell, another one shows its face, and then another, and one more. The deeper you go, the tighter and more sticky they are, and it almost feels like shedding the layers of one’s own skin. Each is slightly different, yet all of them resemble your shape — so closely, one might at times forget they are there. We must be very careful and attentive in this endeavour not to miss them.
Finally, though, we arrive at emptiness, which is both the beginning and the end of this whole creation. And even if we still have a long way to go until we get there, we will likely get glimpses of it ahead of time because, with every shell removed, there’s more breathing room, more space to inhabit unconditionally, and soon enough, we will understand that what we perceive is not what is. In other words, we will begin to see beyond our stories.
This understanding is the safe space which, once touched and inhabited, will keep calling us back home whenever we get lost.
Slowing down and allowing unconditional being causes us to pay attention to the way within which there’s something deeper than the narration that we’re giving to what’s going on. The inner knowing that’s beyond words, beyond conceptualisation, beyond conditioning. Ceasing to narrate our lives, if only for a moment, we enable ourselves to connect with the truth greater than what’s contained within the borders of our skin.
How do we move from isolation to interconnectedness?
Paradoxically yet, there’s a significance of stories that cannot be denied: their unifying, connecting quality.
While our individual stories often divide us, the narrative capacity itself is not restricted to our own limitations. It can span across time and lifetimes within it. It can connect and touch the spaces in us which we’ve never knew about. Stories operate through us differently when we share them. Stepping out of our limited perspectives into the vast spaces of mutual understanding and compassion, we enable the healing potential of collective narratives.
These are the stories we need, and urgently so.
“These are the kind of things we need for the tired spaces of our world. This is the way we need to move forward in a world that is so interested in being comforted by the damp blanket of bad stories. We need stories of belonging that move us towards each other, not from each other; ways of being human that open up the possibilities of being alive together; ways of navigating our differences that deepen our curiosity, that deepen our friendships, that deepen our capacity to disagree, that deepen the argument of being alive. This is what we need. This is what will save us. This is the work of peace. This is the work of imagination” — Pádraig Ó Tuama
The effort of collective, unifying story is, I feel, inseparable from another view, and only through it enabled to serve all, and humbly. It comes from the same thinker, the same gentle mind. It’s a quote I find myself returning to frequently these days:
“So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars. Let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies. Let us listen to the sounds of our own voices, of our own names, of our own fears. Let us name the harsh light and soft darkness that surround us. Let’s claw ourselves out from the graves we’ve dug. Let’s lick the earth from our fingers. Let us look up and out and around. The world is big and wide and wild and wonderful and wicked, and our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable, and full of meaning. Oremus. Let us pray.”
Are we ready to use the stones of our pain and grief and sorrow and build altars of resilience, hope and mutuality? Can we claw ourselves from the graves of our personal, narrow, limiting stories to walk out freely into the vastness of the collective, built of million voices, and resounding of the variety and otherness? Are we willing to truly inhabit the wild and wicked and wonderful big wide world that waits for us to be embraced, as opposed to conditioned?
Stripping our emotions from stories lets us co-experience them. And that’s what we need for social, global healing. When I read the news and talk with people around me, I can see that there is no separation of the Ukrainian sorrow, and Russian anger, and Polish fear. There is no division in the Palestinian pain, and Israeli suffering. There is no limit to the Brazilian grief of deforestation, and African pain of hunger. The Bangladeshi outrage of abuse, and American shame and resentment of inequality are not exclusive to them. These all are universal, collective emotions. It’s the individual story turned national that divides us and prevents from seeing these emotions for what they are. Without these stories, we’d be free to share this planet equally and peacefully, and hold each other in challenging times.
The same narrative capacity which keeps us separated, holds the potential of transcending these divisions. By acknowledging that those who have wronged us are, themselves, shaped by their own stories of hurt and misunderstanding, we see that their emotions are no different to ours. It’s only the story that differs from one person to another. This shift of perspective doesn't diminish our feelings but allows us to experience them in a more grounded, universal context.
By seeing our emotions as part of a shared human experience, we can move beyond stories of division, allowing our feelings to connect us rather than separate us. We can then experience our emotions in their pure form, as universal experiences.
Marilyn Nelson, a historical poet and contemplative, in the conversation with Krista Tippett for On Being tells the story of one of her poems. In it, she describes a time when a church used as the meeting house, was burned down. It was also a place where slaves were kept, in the old time America. And writing the poem, she says how she imagined that, despite the societal division, everybody in town, the free people, the enslaved people, was rushing around with a bucket brigade, trying to put the fire out.
And then there are a couple of lines in which she describes how people look at each other and see their own fear in each other’s eyes. She calls it “sharing a crisis beyond expression, beyond words, looking at each other and seeing one’s own experience”.
That’s the power of co-experiencing, of stripping ourselves bare of our individual narratives and separations, and standing naked, together, in the happening. Without the layers of prejudice, limited perspectives, self-serving preferences, fear-induced aversions, personal desires, and proud self-image, we have nothing to defend, and so, at last, we are free to simply be. And to be together.
Collective stories are therefore those we perhaps feel more than tell. Although, certainly, there is a place and time for words, I believe we should first learn to see while looking and hear when listening, before we choose to speak. Then, when we open our mouths, our words will only serve to unite and heal and hold and care, and there would be no being that is excluded from this communal embrace.
Our emotional states are in the continuity with the natural world at large. This truth is a fruit of the persistent and caring work of Jane Goodall, among others, whose perspective I feel compelled to bring into this argument, two days after her 90th birthday.
Before she ventured out to Tanzania to watch Chimpanzees, people believed humans are the only beings capable of emotions and thought, a notion reinforced by the Christian tradition. She invited us all to look at the world anew. Through her efforts, we began to see ourselves for who we really are — creatures among creatures: “When you study animals in the wild, you realize how they live and understand the interconnection of everything and how every little species has a role to play … So, you understand that everything is interconnected on this planet.”
But that understanding and continuity can only truly work through us if we allow them to emerge from the stories we share and embody. Goodall's insights remind us of the profound connections that exist not just between humans across different cultures and experiences but also between us and the natural world. Remembering this, we are invited to broaden our narrative horizons beyond the human realm, to include the stories of all life forms with whom we share this planet.
As we navigate our lives, enveloped at times in our individual narratives that limit and divide, we must remember the transformative power of collective stories. These narratives do not merely recount events; they create the very fabric of our shared reality, constantly pointing at our interconnectedness and mutual dependence. They remind us that beneath the superficial differences imposed by individual and cultural stories, we share a common thread of humanity and, most of all, the unifying and precious quality of life itself.
In this recognition lies our greatest strength: the ability to see beyond the self to the collective. It is in this vast expanse of shared experience and collective being that we find the seeds of compassion, understanding, and ultimately, healing. By embracing the collective narrative, we step into a realm of possibility where “seeing our own fear in each other’s eyes” becomes the bridge to a more inclusive and connected world.
The transitioning from individual isolation to the embrace of collective interconnectedness is both a personal and communal endeavour. It requires us to strip off the layers of narratives that confine us, to keep returning home to emptiness, a place of clarity, vulnerability and openness.
From this place, we can build new stories—ones that celebrate our shared humanity, recognise the dignity of all beings, and foster a world where the vastness of our collective experience becomes the foundation for healing and hope.
“So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars.”
— Pádraig Ó Tuama
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Question to you, dear reader:
What do you find in silence?
Gratitude for your beautiful words and reflections! Bringing me back to the contemplation of my own stories steeped in chronic illness. Yet understanding they are stories to give me a perceived sense of protection and safety. I have been slowly and tentatively stepping out of my stories. Now in the silence of my own being I am finding my true and authentic self full of compassion, love and peaceful joy. Gratitude for showing up in the world and sharing your exquisite gifts which give me much to ponder and contemplate 🙏🏻💖
Yet another beautiful letter! Great work!