The Story of Our Lives

A blank page begs for a good story. And here I am, in my apartment in Cyberjaya, trying to spin a yarn that hopefully could touch the reader both intellectually and emotionally.

Let's begin with the mind's yearning for stories. Why do we like them so much? Why do we listen to the storytellers of old, believe the myths passed down by our forefathers and worship writers and actors who bring these tales to life?

Let me put forth a thesis: the mind only understands and remembers stories. Stories are the mind's natural unit of storage--every story is like a file, if you will. We will always forget facts but remember stories. Stories tie facts together into a coherent whole. Facts woven neatly into a dramatic story will be remembered forever, because our memories are engineered by nature to store stories.

No wonder, one of the more popular mnemonic devices when it comes to remembering a list of things is to weave them into a story--the more fantastic the better. If only our teachers know how our minds work better, they would become much better educators. Students will never be forced to remember dry formulae in maths or important dates in history; by giving every formula a history context and every date an emotional significance these subjects will not be so dull.

Stories have a natural sequence of events and an emotional arc. No single event or fact stands in isolation. The mind recognises a pattern. There's tension and release, which generates emotion. That is also why we all like music--music plays with our mind's natural inclination for expectation (a fifth) and satisfaction (the tonic key). Whenever these patterns of ups and downs, tension and release harmonises with the the 'natural frequencies' of our soul, we find resonance.  We feel the 'vibe'.

Reason always have to be fused with emotions for anything to take root within our psyche. Stories, and in their larger context, myths do exactly that. Reason alone provides direction and logical sequence but it has no energy--it is static; emotion has energy but no direction--it is blind. The storyteller cleverly fuses the Apollonian and the Dionysian streaks in all of us, to create enduring myths.

All great accomplishments, all great nations and tribes, all religions require myths as their foundation.  Nothing endures without the binding power of myths. Nothing moves without the propulsion of belief, which is the mind's faith in the unfoldment of a good story, rushing headlong to its inevitable conclusion. Emotions, underpinned by reason, drives an army to war and a suicide bomber to martyrdom.

Stories and myths inevitably idealise things. We forgive the writers of historical dramas for exercising poetic license. Events are rearranged, dialogues invented for greater dramatic effect. They tug and play with our emotions, appealing to our sense of right and wrong and our natural inclination for justice, which requires heroes and villains.  If we recognise that is how our minds work, we can use the device of stories better to help us remember and organise facts, provided that we are careful in separating fact from fiction.

A person's life is itself a story--one that has a clear beginning and end. When a person's belief resonates with a larger cause--a nationalistic or religious myth--it becomes a current in a larger wave. A 'meaningful' life is nothing but a story that conforms to some archetypal myth. What's your story?