Some posts on Diane’s blog reminded me of the book Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Naomi Remen. I love her books; this one helped me a lot several years ago when I was feeling a bit beat up by life and somewhat useless. So I thought I’d come back here and share some of it, and encourage people to get it and read it.
This is from the introduction to the book.
All real stories are true. Sometimes when a patient tells me their story, someone in their family will protest. “But it didn’t happen quite that way, it happened more like this.” Over the years I have come to know that the stories both these people tell me are equally true, equally genuine, and that neither of them may be “correct,” an exact description of the event much as a video camera might have recorded it. Stories are someone’s experience of the events of their life, they are not the events themselves. Most of us experience the same event very differently. We have seen it in our own unique way and the story we tell has more than a bit of ourselves in it. Truth is highly subjective.
All stories are full of bias and uniqueness; they mix fact with meaning. This is the root of their power. Stories allow us to see something familiar through new eyes. We become in that moment a guest in someone else’s life, and together with them sit at the feet of their teacher. The meaning we draw from someone’s story may be different from the meaning they themselves have drawn. No matter. Facts bring us knowledge, but stories lead to wisdom.
Addofio 