Our lives depend on stories: They are as necessary to survival as our five senses. Stories may be our sixth sense.

Donald Williams, Jungian Analyst (Boulder, Colorado)

from The Educated Heart, a work on stories and narrative action in Jungian analysis

Our lives depend on stories: They are as necessary to survival as our five senses. Stories may be our sixth sense. We soak up stories and use what we remember to size up opportunities and dangers, to measure desire and repulsion, to tell meaning from n onsense, to hear the voice of conscience, or to touch the heart of love.

We hear and witness stories in the making every day of our lives—from whispered crib words to noisy family dramas, from the social scramble of adolescence to serious adult talk, and from newspapers and films to novels and sacred texts.

We think with stories. We use stories as eyes, ears, a nose, a tongue, and they are the skin through which we register the world up close. We size up people, ideas, opportunities, and day to day life through the stories we learn, whether we learn them a t home by watching, listening, and imagining or learn them at school. We watch television, read books, go to movies, and soak up information about the world while we entertain ourselves.

So, as children we ask a lot of questions and begin constructing the stories we will need. Why does it get dark at night? Why do I have to wash my hands? Where do babies come from? What would happen if I got lost? Who made the world? What do my drea ms mean? Why do the other kids tease me? What happens when we die? We ask a lot of big questions. The stories we hear tell us who we are and who we might become. They explain how to see and reach others, when to cry or smile, how one thing causes another, and why we suffer. We thrive, fail to thrive, or even die according to the stories we hear, the dramas we witness, the roles we're assigned.

The most intimate dramas—love stories, heroic quests, travelogues, tragedies, comedies, morality plays—are acted out by our families right in front of our eyes. We watch how love sustains or imprisons our parents and how work excites or wears them down. We see skillful masters of complicated actions as we watch them cook, talk, drive, work, and play. Or we see people tormented by demons of depression, mania, rage, and shame. Our parents or relatives may drink, carouse, endanger our lives, and then beg for forgiveness. Even though we are in their care, they may look to us for their salvation.

We watch how our parents mete out punishment, withhold forgiveness, or offer love and kindness. We witness and learn. Our parents provide us with a narrative tradition, with familiar stories of our time and place, with family histories, stories we use t o forecast desired or feared futures, stories to explain ourselves to others and to make sense of why we're happy, lonely, or anxious.

The first stories I heard convinced me that it was dangerous to depend on people but good to be dependable. I learned that comforting, stroking hands could also entrap. I listened to women tell emotionally resonant stories and watched men keep their sto ries to themselves. The stories I took in and reworked convinced me how important it was to be good, how dangerous to get angry or even excited, and how necessary to listen and love well.

As I grew older, I gained access to more voices. I did the usual things that young boys do—Boy Scouts, Little League Baseball, neighborhood touch football. The difference between a poem and a theorem made little difference to me until adolescence. In adolescence, the stories I heard of the cold war and the space race pointed me to a career in engineering. I spent the tenth grade at the technical high school in downtown Baltimore. Meanwhile I had become the subject of some new family stories. I beca me the offbeat character whose best friend was a Jewish boy who lived in a black neighborhood. I didn't dance, have a girlfriend, or hang out. In the late 50s I was learning to scuba dive. My behavior didn't fit the good Southern Methodist character I was supposed to be. When we moved that year back to North Carolina, I began to read other stories—by Thoreau, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoi, Freud, and others. These authors changed my trajectory dramatically. So much for engineering. Against all common sense, I veered away from science and toward the humanities. By now there were more than enough stories to confirm just how different I was from the rest of my family. I used these stories, as we all do, to fashion my own texts. These new texts made sense o f the world as I saw it, helped me distinguish north and south, and propelled me toward eccentric friends, new ideas, and occasional quests.

I remember the stories my parents (mostly my mother) told of their lives, the stories I constructed about them, and their stories about me. To this day, the encapsuled stories I remember affect me as surely as gravity affects apples. These early stories make me think differently from my colleagues, speak softly, listen to other people closely, appreciate virtues like honesty, kindness, humor, and discipline, take shallow breaths in groups, and anticipate the time when I will be alone again.

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