Everyone wants to buy fire. Life can be cold. We all want something more then cold, something more... At the same time, we all fear the flames. We all have burn scars, and we wear them proudly, and careful.
This is a fable. A story about our own stories and the stories around us. No story is told the same way twice. Someone told it to me. I rephrase as best I can from the bits I remember. If you can’t hear mine, hear it in your own voice, slowly and carefully pronounced. Add in a soft guitar and a campfire.
In each of us there are two narratives; who we fear we are and who we hope we are.
The truth is somewhere in between. It flickers. We have fat days and skinny days. To see our own truth is much like a broken clock; we are right twice a day - as we arch up, spin ourselves into motion, and once more as we slow down again, as we wane.
We decide on the story we want for the day and we tell our future selves what happened. Those moments cannot be discerned and usually we are brushing our teeth or driving home so they pass gently and unmarked.
These narratives, all three, are important and powerful things. When influenced by the world around us, we feel like, and act like, one of those stories. You're hurt? You become who you fear. Inspired? You become a little bit more of who you hope to be.
It’s not just the world that bends these stories; we do. What we choose to do - our actions make one of these stories real. Go to the gym? We walk away sore and every bit of us that wants to fly is just a little bit more real. Let things get to us? We carry that with us and the world is colder and does taste a bit more like ashes. More then anything, most of our control is what, and who, we listen to.
It's a lot of responsibility, which makes it hard to remember.
All of this changes the truth like oil, water, and rocks in a bucket.
We are both players and the gamed. Storytelling starts with learning to hear those stories in ourselves, to listen to them. Without question, once we know them and understand, we can “edit” our own life, tilt who we are moment by moment towards who we want to be, and that is a better road.
Fear is louder. Hope takes hearing it through the fear; its an ear you develope.
Once your ears and eyes seek the patterns we start to see those stories in everyone around us. Everyone you meet screams their stories in everything they do. Often we we see the stories in shadows; what is the opposite of “is afraid of change?” or “wants to be liked?” One story tells you the other.
It doesn’t take much experimentation to figure out that people act like the version of them we treat them as. Treat anyone like a child? You get a child. That one is either charming or shy. That one wants acceptance and fears their own alienation. You don’t need to know all the details.
This is no children’s story. It's an adult world and this is a story about fire.
First, you sell it to yourself. You light your own fire. Chances are, lots of people helped you with that and you can’t even remember. That is fine, none of us are in this to be remembered.
Then you learn to see the desire, the versions of self we each want to be true, in the rest of us out here on the outside of yourself. When you're on fire, you see it in others.
Then, you beckon, mirror, seduce, extort, and persuade by telling the people around you that they are the version of their story they want, hope, and dream to be true. You give it away.
You do it with words, patience, gestures, silence, actions, listening, and more than anything by example. At least on your good days, and sometimes on the bad ones, and doing it changes everything.
It’s a fire-sale, one day at a time. Everything must go.
It’s a story about selling, and burning, and choosing what you sell, and how you burn. It helped me and I hope it helps you. It’s yours now.
I am still working on - “The Elephant: Anatomy and Biology of NLP AI” (P2) or whatever I call it in the end - and hope to get it cleaned up by [Unknown]. This is an accidental “bonus” that came from someone reminding me of the story and deciding to jot it down before I forgot it again. Thank you Justin P.
May your weekend be gentle and your week productive.
- David