Heart-Lifting for Disheartening Times – Storytelling is Always an OPPORTUNITY

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!

O – Storytelling is Always an OPPORTUNITY

An OPPORTUNITY to adventure…or to introspection and reflection…or to exploration…

An OPPORTUNITY to taste something really different…or perhaps to sink into the warmly familiar.

It begins, and you don’t know where it will take you – but it will take you someplace…

…and give you the OPPORTUNITY to experience something you wouldn’t otherwise.

• Whatever the plot,
• or who the characters are and what they do;
• whatever the obstacles that are confronted;
• wherever a story takes you, whether to an ordinary everyday situation or to a foreign or fantastical setting…

 …storytelling gives you the OPPORTUNITY to travel somewhere, to experience something, to empathize with someone.

This rich, astonishing, often-big-payoff OPPORTUNITY can be as close as your back porch, computer screen, or kitchen table.

And no matter the content of the story being told, the process and experience of being a part of the storytelling triangle – teller, audience, and story – is always an OPPORTUNITY for your imagination and heart and spirit to be lifted and nourished!

Thanks for reading – Pam

Top photo by Abhishek Upadhyay. Opening door photo by Christian Bass. Forest pathway photo by Zachary Ferguson. All on Unsplash.