Stories: The Threads That Connect Us

The “Vinyl Cafe” is a wonderful one hour  radio show, written and hosted by Stuart McLean, that  features stories, essays and music. It  airs  weekends on Seattle PBS station KUOW (FM 94.9)  via CBC Radio in Canada. More often than not, my wife and I will stumble into it during weekend car outings. In our minds, the best part of the show is when Stuart tells us a story featuring the fictional “Dave”, owner of a second hand record store, and his family, neighbors and friends. Why, we’ve arrived at our destination so totally wrapped up in Dave’s latest adventure that we’ll sit there, engine running, until the end of the tale. The yarns are usually hilarious, and we’ll leave the car uplifted, enthralled and bemused.

Stories: they are the fabric that weaves throughout our lives and are the threads that bring us together – bind us -  as human beings. Without the enriching power of stories, our worlds would be very empty indeed and devoid of intimacy and life. Sharing our fears, joys, sorrows and triumphs, or simply how our day was – that’s what families, loved ones, and friends do with each other.

Pauline Boss, Ph.D., states that a real challenge for families in today’s world is to maintain connections. “Unless there is some time for being together psychologically – emotionally and cognitively – the psychological family may disappear. Without time for talking, laughing, arguing, sharing stories, and showing affection, we are just a collection of people who share the same refrigerator.”* In Hawai’i where I grew up, this was called “talking story”.

So let’s foster  a new “culture of connection”, shall we! The next time you sit down with your family for dinner, ask that your children shut down the iPhone, put away the iPad, turn off the X-Box, disengage from the Wii, so you can be together as a family. And that goes for you too: no Blackberry at the dinner table! And yes, perhaps you will get the occasional eye-rolls. Hang in there: it’s a good thing.

* “Ambiguous Loss: Learning To Live With Unresolved Grief”, Pauline Boss, Ph.D., at pg. 57 (Harvard University Press, 1999)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 30th, 2010 at 5:37 pm and is filed under Communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.