It’s interesting how people think. They’re dreams, they’re goals—the need for constant expression through Facebook statuses, tweets, and blogs. We crave attention, but also a legacy, while we mortals toil through our short existence we search for a way to leave an impression in this world. Art, movies, books, photographs and newspapers—all revolve around people and their stories—all encompass the human narrative.
The essence of humanity is not us, but our story. A story that began millennia ago, a story played out again and again, that is being told and lived and breathed by 6.8 billion people right now. The biggest typo in human history is believing that there is more than one story—that each book on the shelf of a library has a different plot, a different moral. The growing feeling of restlessness and lack of creativity is not the realization that everything to be said, that everything creative has already been said, written down and made into a movie, is actually slow struggle to finding the truth: that no matter what decisions we make, where live and die everyone on the planet has the exact same feelings, the exact same morals and the exact same story as the rest of us.
That may sound sad or pathetic. It may strip you of your hope, or perhaps my theory doesn’t affect you at all because you disagree. But I think it’s beautiful. Life was not meant to be lived separately. We are not one story unto ourselves. We are but one word, and it’s only when we go out into the world, when we connect with other people and share our word and see their words that our life becomes a sentence, and then a paragraph and then slowly, person by person, word by word, a story is formed. A wholly remarkable, completely awe-inspiring story. And because it is made up of all the people in the world, everyone can read it. Everyone understands it. Each reading is like feeling your own soul float up out of the pages and wrap itself around you as it softly whispers “hello.”
A great author does not find the words for story in themselves, but instead leaps out of a window and gathers words from all the people in the street, and then they go on to the next street and gather more words and on and on they go until they have too many words in their head to remember and they must go rushing back home to write them all down.
Every book is the same story taken down from different people. Every book you ever read has the same words, the same plot as every other book. You only believe them to be different because every author decides to put the words they gather in a different order than the last. But every story is still made from the same people; every story is still the same.
