The delight I felt in finishing Boys on the Edge after ten years of coaxing and two years’ writing was wonderful enough. However, the joy received since, from the warm reactions of friends and family, has totally eclipsed it. Your comments, reviews, reflections, and shared memories have touched me deeply and I want to thank you from the “bottom of all four chambers of my heart,” as my mom used to say.
Stories Knit Us Together
Running through all these conversations there’s been a common thread. Stories have an amazing power to bring us closer to one another. They reveal how similar we are, in hopes, dreams, and fears. Drawn in to a story, we find that we are more willing to accept our similarities than our differences. While life circumstances are as diverse as our unique personalities, we all want to be loved and included, we want to succeed in our aspirations and purposes, and we want to leave our part of the world better. If our lives are a book, even the shortest moments are elements of our larger story. A phrase as simple as how was your day provides an opportunity for us to share a happy, sad, or exciting short story, as part of the greater narrative of our grand story.
I’ve been amazed how your comments have revealed connections and relationships that I never knew existed. Many have opened doors to exciting new relationships. Comments have ranged from readers being reminded of a simpler place and time, how close adventure, joy, and agony were when we were 16, how amazing the music was then, and how anxious were the times.
Some have shared stories that I’ve never heard before. In some cases, stories they’d never shared with anyone else. Some passage in Boys urged or nudged them to weave in a part of their own story that relates us in ways they hadn’t realized before. Discoveries of relationships, common interests like music, activities, places, and events, and more than a few “I was there when you were,” or “I used to feel that way too.”
Stories reveal how much we have in common, but at their core, they have the unique ability of connecting our hearts. We can become dearer to one another by sharing our stories. As Eugene Peterson describes storytelling, “a kind of intimacy develops naturally when men and women walk and talk together, with no immediate agenda or assigned task except eventually getting to their destination and taking their time to do it.” [1]
One Story Compels Another, and Soon, You Have a New Friend
When writing Boys over the past couple of years, life continued, but differently. I was no longer running a company with its structured relationships and requisite conversations. I had to go out into my new coastal community to seek new relationships and conversations. One of the first questions asked by people was – ‘what do you do?’ To my total surprise and delight, each time I answered the question with something like – “I’m writing a memoir about growing up at Cape Lookout,” – my new acquaintance invariably and enthusiastically shared one or seven favorite stories of local lore from their personal experience, or that of a grandmother, cousin, or co-worker.
I marveled at how much closer and faster the bonds developed than any time in recent memory. The difference was that I was able to take the time for the one-on-one sharing of stories that make our hearts smile, glow with pride, and beat a little faster. I’ve learned that when we’re invited into someone’s story, we unwittingly lower our guard and set aside our superficial judgements, that we so reflexively make as humans. Instead, through story we quite naturally and casually incline ourselves to listen, to enter in, and fully experience what the other is sharing, so much so that their stories become part of our own. I believe I’ve shared every one I’ve heard over the last two years.
Who can resist the captivating invitation – let me tell you a story? And who can resist not sharing one or more of our own in response? In the back and forth of the telling, we realize how much we are enjoying the company of a person who moments earlier, may have been a total stranger. We hardly notice that the foundations of an enduring friendship are being laid.
[1] Peterson, E. (2008). Tell it Slant. Colorado Springs: Wm. B. Eerdmans.