Following up on my last post, here’s a quote I recently came across that made me chuckle:
“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
Alan Watts
I wonder how often we inflate things by attaching a story to it that is much more elaborate than what is actually going on. Fact vs. fiction? In a way, we are sense making machines through stories. It’s how we manage to agree and disagree too, in politics and elsewhere.
This reminds me of my German classes in High School. Each time we’d read a poem our teacher asked us to interpret it. What did the poet mean with this? Inevitably it triggered an avalanche of hypothesis which made me wonder if the person who came up with the poem in the first place could have ever imagined all of this.
What stories are you adding to your life?