It’s all so overwhelming and it seems everyone is tired, discouraged, maybe angry or cynical or depressed, maybe confused or disheartened…just weary.
Each day during this April A-Z Blogging Challenge I’ll offer a short musing on an aspect or two of the many ways the ancient-yet-very-contemporary experience of storytelling – both listening and telling – is an enjoyable, fortifying and heart-lifting practice, for anyone!
E – Storytelling offers ESCAPE at times, and EMPATHY-building nearly always.
Sometimes you just need to ESCAPE into a good story.
When you listen to a story, whatever your age, you’re transported mentally to another time and place — and who can’t use that from time to time these days?
There’s a delicious feeling of being swept into a story world – you can forget about your surroundings and become totally immersed.
Movies and books offer us such ESCAPE, as well. (Personally, I love both reading and movie-going!) But honestly – when I tell a story, and see listeners’ eyes and eyebrows and postures and other physical reactions…it’s obvious and thrilling to have them enter into the story with me! Neuroscience tells us that as you hear a story unfold, your brain waves actually start to synchronize with those of the storyteller.
It can be a refreshing ESCAPE. And sometimes – not always, but surely sometimes – that’s just what we need.
I can’t let “E” pass without also mentioning EMPATHY.
Building empathy is one of storytelling’s super powers!
I’ll offer a quote from author Neil Gaiman, that applies directly to storytelling:
When you hear a story you, “using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed.”
And: “Fiction builds empathy – Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.”
ESCAPE and EMPATHY–building… Totally a winning combination!!
Thanks for reading – Pam
Top photo of escaping child by Avi Waxman. Stairs and sky photo by Simon Wood. Glasses photo by Josh Calabrese. All on Unsplash.
Leave a Reply