👟👠 Story time (#9)

Hi !  Welcome back. This week I am thinking (and writing) about elections, story telling, tear jerkers, and slow productivity. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can join here or by clicking the button below. - Eve D.❣️

WEEK IN REVIEW

This week was what I call a “long weekend” week here. Wednesday was a public holiday, so nobody took Monday, Tuesday, Thursday or Friday seriously. Or at least that’s what it felt like.

It’s a year of elections. South Africa just had theirs, and now the whole country is sitting with popcorn in hand watching the results board, America is going to have a convicted felon running against a geriatric and the UK just called elections because (rumour mill says) the current prime minister knows he’s going to lose and would rather spend the summer sunning in California than bickering over policy in London. I voted, am now distancing myself from all the drama, and will deal with all repercussions as they happen. What else can I do?

Also, I’m making very bad decisions as I write this. It’s late Friday night, and I’d like to finish the newsletter before going to bed (it usually goes out on Sat 2pm-ish), because Zac has a chess tournament tomorrow and I probably won’t have access to wifi during the matches. What’s the bad decision, you ask? I like to write this while drinking a glass of wine (🤣 ) so I have a generous glass of Gluhwein in hand 🍷 , but I have to be in the car by 7am tomorrow morning 🛌 ! I am not a morning person, and definitely not on a Saturday. This is unlikely to end well for me. Regrets will be had.

(I might move the newsletter to Sunday from next week. We’ll see how it goes).

FREE THERAPY

MEMORIES

Tell stories

I’ve just read a delightful book, Storyworthy. It’s by Matthew Dicks, and it’s his attempt to teach readers how to tell good spoken stories. Matthew is a master story teller, and has won nine storytelling championships. He knows how to tell a good story, both onstage and off, and this book is enthralling.

As Matthew says at the start of the book, before you can start telling stories, you need stories to tell. Matthew has actually lived an unbelievable life (and not in a good way). He has been homeless, brought back-to-life twice, had a trigger pulled with the gun held against the back of his head (decades of PTSD followed), had head-on collisions, was arrested and tried for a crime he did not commit…and that’s just some of it. So yes, Matthew has good material to talk about. But some of his best stories are from the everyday, menial stuff (think Seinfeld, the “show about nothing”).

The first thing he teaches you in the book is how to find stories in your everyday. The trick for that is remarkably simple: at the end of each day, write down just one sentence about something that happened that day that you’d not want to forget. This is not a diary entry, it’s not a reflective journal page. It’s a quick, one sentence that Matthew keeps in a spreadsheet but you can keep in your diary if you prefer. Every day offers up good material, he says, and he always has 500 stories “waiting to be told”.

I loved this idea, and vowed to do it, and then it occurred to me that my mother did do this, for years and years. Every Christmas she would insist that she be given the daily horoscope book for the following year (she took her horoscope very seriously. Scorpio) and on almost every day she would write into that book a very brief one-liner of what happened that day. Then, every single day, she would go through her old books and call my sister and me to give us a run down of why that day was (or should be) significant in our lives. “We bought Pola 18 years ago, today” she would remind us, even though the poor dog was long dead. “We crossed the border 21 years ago” (we were refugees, escaping from Poland). “You bought me the wrong perfume for my birthday four years ago”.

When she passed, unexpectedly and years too early, I inherited all the horoscope books. Not intentionally, but because I am the only one in the family who can read her handwriting and who can read Polish. So now it’s up to me to collate all the books into one “memory” book and share that with my sister, so we can keep up the tradition. I have’t done it (it’s not easy, on so many levels. One day.). But now that I have read Storyworthy I am a) going to really try and do it, and b) continue the tradition. Every hand written line in her books, across hundreds and hundreds of them, triggers a memory of a family with a life well lived. A very highly recommended tradition to start!

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Floodworks

A friend tweeted a while back about how she could manage to stay strong through whatever crap the day deals out, but then break down when she watches a video of a rescued and rehabilitated dog.

“Yes!” I wanted to shout. Me too! I can be having a perfectly fine day, hold down the fortress against relentless attack, but when I then watch an innocuous Instagram reel, I’ll be in tears. I thought there was something wrong with me, but I learnt more and more that this happens to other people all the time. I remember my mother would cry at the airport every time one of us was returning home.

We stay strong in our personal lives because not doing so is acknowledging that something is wrong, and that it’s real. And most of us prefer to not do that, in case it opens up other emotions we might not be able to deal with. On the other hand, crying at something that is far removed from us is safe. It allows us to release tears, but without the danger of an emotional breakdown.

But it’s actually better than that. Turns out, crying at moments like this is probably due to oxytocin (the “love hormone”). It enhances emotional responses, and is responsible for heightened feelings of empathy and compassion. It creates a sudden connection to the video’s subjects, and hence the tears. It’s not weird or unusual, and definitely nothing to be embarrassed about.

Next time you tear up over a video, or something else far removed from your personal experience always remember that it simply means you have good social awareness, and it’s a strength not a weakness.

AN ACTUAL TEAR JERKER

This is going to suck

Speaking of tear jerkers. Matthew Dicks, the author of the above mentioned Storyworthy participates in “Moth StorySlams”, which are competitive storytelling events in the United States (and across the world). You attend as an audience member, but can throw your name into a hat and if you are one of ten people picked, you get to go on stage and tell your story. You then receive a score from judges, and there is a winner at the end of the night. There are also national Slams, where there is no hat to pick from because participants are pre-selected. Those are much more competitive and Matthew has won them 9 times (!!).

The video below “This is going to suck” is from one of these StorySlams. It’s of Matthew telling one of his most vulnerable stories. It’s superbly told (unsurprising) but it’s also an excellent example of a story that will make you cry, or at least tear up. (It’s not a sad story). He talks a lot about this story in the book, and so I can tell you that audiences cry at this story all the time, usually twice, and even he gets very emotional no matter how many times he tells it. So, no, it’s not just me (or you) who tears up at emotional videos. It’s all us humans.

While you are at it, spend some time on the YouTube channel. There are some wonderful examples of every day people telling every day stories. Something I aspire to!

LAUGHS

Ha Ha! A mom used Artificial Intelligence and some apps to create a news broadcast that reported on her children’s messy bedroom. The newscaster “announced” to the world that should the children not clean up, all their toys will be taken away. She then let them watch the “news” on TV, and enjoyed a clean room very shortly after! 😆 

BOOKS

Productivity

Since I enjoyed Storyworthy so much, I immediately went to look for Matthew Dick’s latest book “Someday is Today”. It’s his book of 22 tricks to help you be more productive. I’ll be honest, I was exhausted from just reading the first chapter. Mathew is relentless about time management, and not a second of his time is ever wasted. I immediately knew that this is not how I want to live my life. I want to slow down, not speed up. (So does his wife…she wrote what must be the strangest introduction to his book, in which she basically said “…I could never be like Matthew, I don’t want to be like Mathew, but if that kind of life rocks your boat then you’ll love this book…”).

My preference for slowing down reminded me of a bestseller all over my social media, Slow Productivity, so I went in search of it. The book opens up describing a prolific New Yorker author who just lay on a picnic table and looked at trees for weeks, while thinking about his next masterpiece. There was no rush, yet a remarkable 30,000 word article was the result. And that was his method for each of his (many, many) works that he produced. This was much more up my alley. In fact, just this morning I spent 45 minutes sunning on my patio, while thinking up what I am going to write in this week’s newsletter. To anyone watching me, I was just lazing around. To me, I was hard at work. With my eyes closed.

I’ve only read one chapter of each of these books, and I have my clear favourite. Not all of you will agree! But wherever you like to fall on the productivity spectrum, you’ll find help in at least one of these books. (Although, to be fair…if you choose the “Someday..” book then you really need to read “Slow Productivity”, to save yourself from yourself 🤣).

Thanks for reading!

That’s it for this week. (Want more? You can find past editions here). I hope you have a great weekend and upcoming week. Please keep sharing /forwarding to your friends/groups 😄 and let me know any feedback (you can just hit reply to this email, if you’re reading it in your inbox).

PS