So, the first week of 2022 was very INTERESTING for me. My first podcast of the year with Rosie Beech of Yorick Radio Productions was supposed to air on Wednesday January 5th. Everything seemed to go smoothly, but there was a problem with the audio, which it took Barry and I most of Wednesday evening to figure out with the help of a couple of people at WordPress. This is not a new problem. And I may have difficulty again when I try to upload the audio for the January 19th episode but that is not the point of this story.

The thing is, this time, I was frustrated, but I wasn’t yelling at the computer like I would have done in the past. Something has shifted in my inner landscape. I’m still working on healing old wounds, attitudes, and beliefs about myself but I do feel encouraged that I didn’t completely panic. As Marie Forleo says all the time on her Marie TV channel and in her book of the same name, “Everything is figureoutable.” Good thing too, because that wasn’t the only glitch we had with technology this week.

All the challenges have made me reflect on what is most important to me and why I’m determined to keep writing and sharing stories. Despite my ineptitude with technology, I want to continue offering Story~Power episodes. Every time I chat with someone, I feel energized by their life experiences and what they have learned from their creative endeavors and the stories they love. They inspire me and I want to share my conversations with all of you in hopes that you will be inspired too.

I was reading a book Barry gave me for Christmas, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. It’s the perfect book for me because I don’t want to do all the things with social media that common wisdom says you must do to promote your creative work. Anyway, I was reading and something she had written made me ask myself why I’m so passionate about stories? And the answer is, human connection. 

The first connection I relate to my love of stories are the conversations I had with my father about the movies we watched together. I loved those conversations because of how our relationship grew. And they made me want to continue to use stories to deepen my connection with my other friends and family.

There are so many layers of connection when we consume stories of any kind, even the ones our family and friends tell us. There are the surface components to the story like, is it funny, poignant, sad or tragic, harrowing, a puzzle to be figured out? But there are also the deeper layers. Why do the characters do what they do? What are the events from their past that influence their actions? Do they learn from the challenges they face as the story goes along? These questions can be applied to in person storytelling as well. We all share the things that happen to us, just like I’m doing now, for a reason. We may not be fully aware of why we’re telling the story, but that doesn’t matter. 

I think when we tell or consume stories, we’re trying to find meaningful connections with the author, movie makers, and characters. I think we talk about them because we want to make the story a communal experience. 

We’re a little bit like a very young boy I witnessed at a child development center where I worked. He was perhaps two years old or so and he climbed the same path on the climbing structure over and over again. The four year olds in my class watched him for a while and then they asked me, “Why does he keep doing the same thing over and over again?” My response was, “He’s trying to teach himself something.” 

Now doing the same thing over and over again can be a bad thing if we think that we’ll get a different result. But if we’re like that little boy and revisit stories, or genres of stories we love, I think we do that because we’re trying to learn something. That’s why I’m a voracious reader, movie, and TV watcher. It’s why I go to see live theatre. I get a chance to learn from the experiences of the characters and not have to live through them myself. I’m always looking for the deeper layers of a story remembering how my father would ask question after question until I understood the storyteller’s purpose.

I believe we need stories because they are one of the best tools for helping us understand ourselves. I’m always trying to understand myself better and I’m grateful for the stories that have helped me in so may ways. I’m more forgiving, more open, and more willing to try new things because for the most part, the characters came through their challenges in a much better condition than when the story began. If I didn’t try to learn from others and from my own experiences, my life would be extremely bleak indeed.

I have a raft of Story~Power episodes that I recorded before the end of the year, and new conversations scheduled. My goal is to deepen my connection with you, my friends, family and social media connections. I don’t know about you, but these last two years have turned everything topsy turvy and I want to see if we can make some sense of it all, together.

I hope your new year is off to a better start than mine. But I’ve learned this week that everything works out in the end if I don’t panic.

Thanks for reading and listening to Story~Power. Welcome to all my new followers. 

Blessings,

Lucinda Sage-Midgorden © 2022

Lucinda is the author of The Space Between Time, an award finalist in the “Fiction: Fantasy” category of the 2017 Best Book Awards.

Have you ever experienced life shattering events? Yeah, most of us have. In The Space Between Time, Jenna Holden gets slammed by her fiancé walking out, her mother’s untimely death, and losing her job all in one week. But she receives unexpected help when she finds her three-times great-grandmother’s journals and begins the adventure of a lifetime.

The Space Between Time is available in all ebook formats at Smashwords and for Kindle at Amazon, or you can find the ebook at iBooks or Barnes and Noble. If you prefer a physical copy, you can find a print-on-demand version at Amazon. Stay tuned for news when the audiobook version is published.

Lucinda is also the host of Story-Power a podcast where she and her guests discuss the stories in all formats that have changed their lives. It’s available here on Sage Woman Chronicles and on Apple, Google, and Spotify podcast apps. Please rate and leave a review. It helps people find me.

Your donations help keep this blog and Story~Power free to consume and free of ads. Thanks in advance for supporting my work.