I was taking a walk thru Golden Gate Park this week thinking about story. I was letting my mind wander then noticing the stories it came up with and trying to notice the relation of the stories to myself, my perceived image of myself, and to space [or at least my perceived image of the space around the moments that made up the stories both initially and in the remembering].
At the end of my walk I went to Starbucks and the line was rather long. At the front of the line there was a man who was clearly not happy with his order and the service. He was raising is voice and red of face as he argued with the Starbucks Employee. I watched as space around him got smaller. People began to back away from him, offering him more space [as if they too noticed the space collapsing around him – and around them, by default thru proximity]. Possibilities for other storylines vanished as he married himself to the one storyline more and more with every word he spoke.
And then I noticed something. Normally this kind of scene would have annoyed me beyond words. But instead, this time, I was filled with compassion. Having just spent the past hour walking and noticing my own stories and my attachments to them as real, I understood in that moment how hard it is to see a story as having any other space or possibility around it. It immediately called to my mind my own moments of retail combat. And, overcome with compassion for this enraged man, I was suddenly over come with compassion for myself – for all those times in the past where I was the enraged customer or employee or family member.
A few years ago I spent sometime interviewing for a documentary Namkha Drimed Rinpoche and had the opportunity at the end of one interviews to ask him a personal question. I asked him how I could remember in the moment of being completely annoyed that the storyline was just a story in my head, that the feeling was impermanent, so as not to create a scene akin to the man at Starbucks. The main point of his response to me was Compassion. I thought to my self, compassion is easier said than done when I’m in the moment of being annoyed… but for the first time that day in Starbucks, I saw a glimpse of what he meant.
Diana
Excellent point, Michael. As each expand to include other possibilities of storylines compassion grows. The thing that interested me when re-watching Stranger than Fiction is how each character begins married to their individual storylines as equaling their identity. How both the Author and the Character are able to move outside of their identity/storyline and in doing so both grow as people. I’ve been feeling a bit like Crick lately as I watch my own storylines form thru-out my day.
You can also see all this in Groundhog Day [I believe that you mentioned that movie in another post]. Bill Murray is only concerned with his own storyline as we see him so self-centered at the start of the movie. As he begins to entertain other people’s storylines his compassion changes from contempt for the people of Punxatawney to compassion. His focus shifts from not wanting to be where he’s at every second of that day to fully living in each moment. By the end of the movie he’s released himself from all storylines and lives in each moment for the moment itself. It’s only then that he is released from ‘time’ and moves onto the next day.
Perhaps both of these are good examples to, as you mention at the end of your comment, ‘moving outside and beyond the confines’ of our own identities.
Side Note – I tended to view the Lit. Professor in Stranger than Fiction as the voice inside our head that labels the storyline as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ etc. The voice that puts a label to our narrative. Are we in a comedy or a tragedy? Comedy = good. Tragedy = bad. etc. etc.
Hi Diana, I wonder if the film, “Stranger than Fiction”, also shows the power of Compassion to dissolve the frozen patterns that take us over. Between the author and the character there seems to arise a compassion that flows both ways: the author is touched by the living counterpart to her fiction and it stays her hand before it can land the fatal blow; and the character sees a larger picture and thereby becomes ready to sacrifice his individual life so that something larger can survive to touch many people. And the literature professor perhaps stands for the part of us that only sees form and believes that there is nothing else worthy of his attention. But I remain mostly in the dark about whether these kinds of relationships exist in me,–relationships among the one who narrates, the one who witnesses, and the one who acts. Does Harold Crick’s sudden ability to hear a narration of his own life express the kind of awareness which can wake up any human being? Is noticing the story the first step towards moving outside and beyond it’s confines?–Michael