For the past eight years, I have had the privilege of speaking to second-year students at local high schools. My topic? What I learned from 4,000 hours, over 20 years, answering more than 11,000 phone calls on the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. I take seriously the fact that I have been given 45 minutes out of the lives of several thousand young people every year. Do they, I wonder, gain anything from the thoughts I share with them?
My remarks have morphed dramatically over the years. As of this writing, my presentation amounts to helping them see that each of us views the world incompletely, and, very often, incorrectly.
Since we are bombarded almost every waking moment by an unspeakable amount of sensory information, we can only absorb a minuscule amount. I ask the students to pay attention as they move from class to class. “How much of what you experience in the crowded hallways can you recall when you arrive at your next class?” Typically, students admit that recalling even a tiny amount would be a monumental success.
Yet, those cryptic, fragmented bits of information are all we have to make sense of the world. We use that chaotic, fractured data to create stories about how the world operates. We believe those stories to be accurate and reliable, but they’re not.
Repeating this hundreds of times has opened my eyes to the fact that everything I know, and everything I believe, is a story I have conjured from a miniscule fragment of reality. Everything that pulses through the vast neural network I call my brain, is incomplete and inaccurate. I had to repeat this story about stories hundreds of times before I finally realized that nothing I “know” is solid, substantial, and correct. Even science and mathematics, the subjects in which I excel, are stories. They are stories that help us navigate our lives, but they are stories, nonetheless.
I remind students that even the stories we tell about ourselves are often inaccurate and incomplete. In those moments when those stories become cruel, when we say things to ourselves we would never say to another human being, there are other stories to be told. In those moments, people who love us, know us well, and have the benefit of perspective, can help us write more accurate and complete stories…stories, if we find the courage to believe their beauty, through which we can learn to love the person we most need to love.