Storyline, by Michelle Welch
One of Pema Chödrön’s best known teachings is to drop the storyline. As she describes in Taking the Leap:
“Pete has a wonderful open quality and a great sense of humor, but when he’s having one of his meltdowns, he temporarily loses all his brilliance and lets the storyline take over, as in: ‘My younger brother gets everything and I never get anything.'”
I had a very vivid experience of this recently during a traffic incident. I was driving home from work after closing that night when I saw what appeared to be a police barricade near the freeway exit I was headed toward. Some people turned around but three of us kept going to see where the closure was and if we could still get on the freeway. Then a truck came toward us, on the wrong side of the street, on fire. We kept going until we were able to turn off on a side street, which allowed us to backtrack and avoid the burning truck and the police. I got home safely over surface streets.
I was a little surprised at how calm I was during the incident, but there was not much, in fact, that I could do. I slowed down and got off the road as soon as I could, I pulled over for police vehicles, and I avoided the burning truck.
About ten minutes later, halfway home and well away from the burning truck and the road closure – that was when the storyline started. I imagined how I would tell the story to my husband when I got home and to coworkers the next day. I searched for dramatic words to describe all the details, reviewing them over and over to make sure I didn’t forget anything. It was no surprise that my calm started to disappear. My heart rate went up; I gripped the steering wheel harder. The more I built up the storyline, the more agitated I became.
It was fascinating: nothing about the incident changed, it was over for me at that point, but my emotional reaction was completely different, and all because of a different line of thought. Our minds do this all the time, of course, as Pema Chödrön’s teaching suggests, but often more subtly. This was a shocking example to wake me up to the reality of how the process works.
