The power of a story
It’s been a hot minute, hasn’t it? How are things going with you? Have you had time to rest and recharge, without feeling guilty? To check in on an old friend of whom you were suddenly reminded by a stranger you passed on the street? To sleep in until noon? To water that succulent that you bought because you thought it would never die because succulents are supposed to be hardy, but it now looks suspiciously like it’s withering from neglect and dammit, is it too late to get your money back?
My point is that work will always be work, and there will always be more work. But there won’t always be more time for the people and things you love.
What have I been doing lately? Not much. A bit of drawing, a bit of animation. A lot of recognising and processing my emotions. Some pottery — getting ever-so-slightly better at the wheel. No running — my training schedule has been entirely scuppered by a shin splint in my left leg and a sprain in my right. To say it sucks would be an understatement. And work, of course. There’s always work.
But I’ve also been thinking about the power of stories — the stories we tell others, the stories others tell us, the stories we tell ourselves. Indeed I’ve found myself drawn (hah) towards sketching out silly little animations on my iPad, delighting in the way I can make my characters dance across the screen. The ability to depict events across space and time unlocks such myriad possibilities for vivid storytelling, compared to a static picture or photo. It’s as if I’ve been bequeathed the power to breathe a whole new world to life. To show you the spinning kaleidoscope of galaxies I thought were confined to the space in my head.
I suppose this recent reverie was brought on through my skimming of Seven Hundred Years: A History of Singapore, which challenges the widely held notion that Singapore’s story only starts from the arrival of Stamford Raffles in 1819. I remember being “educated” in primary school about how modern Singapore was founded by the British, and about how, following their withdrawal, we were the underdog who overcame all odds to go “from Third World to First” through our people’s resilience, hard work and grit. I was too young to know it then, but those narratives had a lasting impact on how I viewed the country’s old colonial masters, and on my ideas about the values one had to espouse to be deemed an upright citizen.
Similarly, if I tell myself now that the system is broken and it’s too late to avert the worst effects of climate change, so I might as well eat steak, drive a big ol’ SUV and party with nihilistic delight (perhaps even all three at once) — that’s a powerful story too, albeit one likely to end in self-fulfilling tragedy.
Herein lies the beauty and danger of stories: If you hear them often enough, you start to believe in them. You act in accordance with your beliefs, and in doing so often end up bringing what might have been a work of pure speculative fiction into real life. As you witness fragments of plot playing out in front of you, you take it as proof that the story was indeed true all along. And so the cycle repeats.
Perhaps I wax on about things that are already painfully obvious to everyone else. But just because we’re aware of our thoughts and biases doesn’t mean we don’t fall victim to them now and then. (For some reason, the Pygmalion effect springs to mind.) Anyhow, I thought this was a good chance to slip in a reminder to be mindful of the stories I tell myself.
I’m falling asleep as I type this, so I’ll leave you on that rather unhelpful note, and with a quick stop-motion animation that I hope will literally add some colour to your day, since it involves a bag of M&M’s, no less. (I can’t seem to resize the video, so click the button in the lower right-hand corner of the video to watch it full-screen.) It’s a story where all M&Ms can move, some M&Ms have feelings, and a few M&Ms are brave enough to extend the hand of friendship to one in need. You never know when your act of courage or kindness will spark some desperately needed change.
I will not say which, if any, M&Ms were hurt or consumed after the filming of this video. That’s a story for another time. 😉
