I sat down to write a blog post today not knowing where my keyboard would take me. Whenever I do this I always hope, somehow, that whatever I’m randomly inspired to write on a given day will be some funny anecdote from my life that makes me seem adventurous and pithy.
I don’t know why that is, really. Maybe it’s because I love stories. I’ve always held a mixture of admiration and envy for those specially gifted people who can simply make up grand tales of heroism and romance out of what seems to be thin air. When I re-read Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings, it is the character of the traveling bard that continuously intrigues me.
He lives a life apart from the world, burdened by the truth. Truth that he disguises in layers of legend, because his audience—both heroes and villains—don’t want to know they’re actually being told how to live their lives. The bard always has something to say, and people listen to him when they don’t want to listen to anyone else.
When I think about it, it’s no wonder that as a child, I fought the occasional impulse to steal a loaf of bread from my parents’ house before striking out on my own to become a hobo. The glamor of the bard’s nomadic, ponderous life, his deep wisdom, masked by fiction—it’s exactly the kind of romantic notion that has fascinated me since my childhood.
Because that’s what people want in a story, isn’t it? Humans like to be shown, not told. All at once we feel a desperate need for guidance, for inspiration—yet stubbornly cling to our independence. And every story that we fall in love with seems to be, in some way, about us—just with more exotic names, and if it’s a good story, a little more magic.
But in any of its forms, a story is simply a vehicle for us to step into another dimension and thereby see our own reality more clearly.
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