We're immersed in story
Transcript of this video:
My friend Will gave me a bottle of olive oil
for my birthday.
It’s a sort of super premium olive oil, a champagne
of olive oils, if you will.
And it sat in the kitchen cupboard for a few days
as I thought about what to do with it,
because you, you don’t want to use this,
lovely oil for just humdrum cooking.
So I thought, oh, I’ll get a salad so
that I can drizzle it with this lovely olive oil.
And so I bought a salad
and then I fell into the habit of buying a salad every day
for lunch, which I hadn’t been doing.
And I smiled as I thought, oh,
that object sat in my cupboard for a week.
And now it’s triggered all this unexpected little
change in my behaviour.
And then I found myself remembering a story
that I’d heard when I was doing A level French,
I think it’s a Maupassant short story, I’m not sure.
But it’s about a man who lives very frugally,
but reasonably contentedly, not spending a lot
of money ’cause he hasn’t got a lot.
And then one day a friend gifts him a beautiful dressing
gown, which he absolutely loves,
loves wearing it about his apartment.
And after a few days he thinks to himself, well,
do you know, I think I should get myself a lovely pair
of slippers to match this dressing gown.
And so in a rare act of extravagance,
he buys himself these slippers and delights in them before
after a few days more, he thinks to himself, do you know,
I think I should get myself some new pajama bottoms to go
with this dressing gown and slippers.
And as the story goes on, you realise
that this man who’s been living very frugally,
is now living beyond his means.
And I think the story ends with him going completely broke.
So already from being gifted a bottle,
I’ve gone into a world of stories.
I suspect that we all do a lot
of the time without even noticing.
And then of course, there’s a backstory
to why this particular bottle
of olive oil had the impact that it did.
And it’s not just to do with a bottle and the oil itself,
but with the backstory that I met Will a couple
of years ago at a retreat hosted by a friend of mine
where he told the whole story of how he came to be
involved in olive oil production.
It involves his brother who fell in love with a Greek woman
and they settled on an island
and got engaged in regenerative farming.
So there’s an incredibly intricate, lovely, lovely
and loving backstory to this olive oil, which
of course meant it was vested
with special properties when he gave it to me.
And you could easily miss that.
And it seems to me that a lot of this subtle,
intricate weaving of stories around ourselves is,
is kind of deleted by a lot of our sort
of social media activities where there’s a tendency to,
and in organizations as well where there’s a tendency
to shortcut all that, tiresome detail
and reduce things to seven steps and four processes.
Well, I like to spend my time paying more attention
to stories because I think in witnessing them
and paying attention to them, I think we start
to nurture real human relationships,
which actually will probably give us more satisfaction than
trying to execute on these rather hurried steps to success.
And one of the ways I’m exploring
that is in a workshop hosted with my friend Shawn Callahan,
we called it Immersed in Story, which I have
to say I increasingly think is a really good title.
And I’ll put some details of it in a link.
And I also host occasional story circles.
I’ll put a link to those as well.
