I love a good story. I love it even more when you can hear the story told by a masterful storyteller. It can get better. When you have two masterful storytellers together and they escalate the stories. “I haven’t been on many rivers in the state, but the Santee River is certainly pretty down here near the coast.” “I’ve been on just about every river in the state and you are right the Santee is pretty.” “When I played football we practiced six days a week and on Sunday afternoon some of us would get together for an informal practice.” “We practiced six days a week and on Sunday we did a ten mile run and did an informal scrimmage. We did win the state championship that year.”
See how easy it is to up the ante of a conversation? A lot of these conversations are fun. A great story can become much better with just a little embellishment. A bad story can get much worse also.
One of my friends can jump in and highjack a conversation in a minute. If you went to a park, he has been to several nearby national parks. You’ve been exercising; he’s training for a triathlon. If the pollen is bothering you, don’t worry; he’s been in intensive care for the last 80 days.
The interesting thing about my friend is that I don’t know what kind of job he has. I only see him about once a year. He might come by and have a riveting tale of building a power plant in equatorial Africa or putting a solar panel on top of Mt. Everest. Most of the time he just waits for you to have a story and then he can top it.
His forte is sucking the oxygen out of the room with his health stories. Despite traveling the world and doing everything else, he has the worst health problems of anyone on earth. I contribute most of these illnesses to his story telling ability. You can’t look at him and know anything is wrong. Most of the time he is cured by a combination of voodoo, aromatherapy, holistic medicine and special herbs combined with essential oils.
This year he has stopped by to give his take on living in the present. He can outdo anyone with depression or anxiety. He simply lives in the present now. This can be done without any of his usual remedies for illness. He must have been studying psychiatry this past year. We heard about worrying about the past (depression) and worrying about the future (anxiety) and how he keeps his mind on the present. Talk about sucking all the oxygen out of the room. After he got through recounting his problems of the past and his fears for the future, I thought there could be no hope for him. One guy said, “he must buy Prozac, valium, and vodka by the 50 gallon drum.” Nobody even got close to having a story to top that.
Now he is into living in the present. He only keeps his mind on what he can do that very moment. Apparently, he is not worried about anything. He new mental state allows him to lead an idyllic life with no worries.
I kind of miss the stories he used to tell. Living in the present may have benefits but the stories are not as good. Worrying about the future probably affects everybody, but worrying about a meteor landing in the Atlantic Ocean and producing a tidal wave 200 feet high washing away everything from Charleston to St. Louis Missouri is a much better story.