Stories...

Be it of privilege, of poverty, of justice prevailing or not; every being has a story. The first time I saw the above picture I was haunted by it's poignancy, but unable to write about it. Too often it's tempting to travel though life with our eyes firmly closed to the stories people around us may have to tell. We often don't want to be witness to the intricacies of their lives; we don't want clarity or intimate knowledge of where and whom they went home to at night, their joy and their sorrow, their love or their heartache. Because once you know it their lives can become a part of our story.

It's tempting to hide at home reading Alice Pung because she's safe. Her stories of poverty, struggle and oppression, are beautifully written and bound together in book's with a guaranteed happy ending. Stories of triumph, leaving you with the comforting impression that there is a sense of justice to this world. 

But as Milan Kundera once wrote that “... there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”

On opening my eyes I find that my difficulty is not compassion; the telling of or becoming involved in a story, that is the easy part. My difficulty is walking away; choosing whose story to tell and whose battle to fight. I struggle keeping quiet, letting go and acknowledging that the world is at times is cruel and unfair and as much as I wish I could find a way to fix everything and everyone's pain, communicate every untold story to the world... I can't.

There will always be countless stories, retold and forgotten in equal measure; I am coming to believe that while I can't fix the world's problems or pay tribute to every story, I can go through life dedicated to keeping my eye's open to the stories of those around me. I can pray for the wisdom to know what stories I am called to tell, what battles I am called to fight and when I'm called to simply let go.

“The planet does not need more ‘successful people’. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds. It needs people to live well in their places. It needs people with moral courage willing to join the struggle to make the world habitable and humane and these qualities have little to do with success as our culture is the set.”

— Tenzin Gyatso, The 14th Dalai Lama