The Story We Tell Ourselves

It's about a rubber ducky

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This is a season of overwhelm.

The unpredictability of spring, or schedules, or technology, health, climate change, relationships, our social and political worlds - in a word, Life - has more than a few of us squirming at the necessity of adaptation.

Why can’t we just keep on keeping on the way it worked BEFORE ? According to tales we tell ourselves, it was simpler then. And if it wasn’t exactly easy, at least then we had the means to work through whatever was complicating things. Then, we could push on, shift goals, handle rejection, dress appropriately, vote for hope and change.

Of course, then has been colorized, filtered through our propensity for storytelling until it fits what we want to believe, mainly that we had some agency. All those great memories - my first novel; your dream vacation; setting up a business or starting a family, moving, navigating a crisis - we accomplished that. But somehow, we can’t naturally translate those past successes into faith in the present, or future promise.

It is easy to get stuck.

French philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal, wrote of dual infinities - an infinite past and an infinitely infinite future - talk about overwhelming! And in his masterwork Pensées, a diary of thoughts, many in the form of aphorisms, he notes:

“We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground….”

and

“Condition of man: inconstancy, weariness, unrest.”

Too true. No wonder we exhaust ourselves.

But the world keeps turning, and our ambition, dreams, projects, needs keep calling for attention. So, how do we contemplate progress? How, when we’re wired for overwhelm, do we open ourselves to new ideas, create new words and works, take risks, keep on?

We need magic, of course. Like a rubber ducky.

Author and Writing Brave coach Brooke Adams Law tells a personal story about explaining her journaling practice to a friend:

Jorge is a computer engineer, and he was very curious about this. 

“I don’t know anyone who journals,” he said. “Tell me more about this.”

I explained that journaling (while I don’t always want to do it) helps me process anything I’m working through - in business, in parenting, in relationships. If something is bothering me, I figure out how I really feel about it by journaling. If I have a problem, I often journal about the problem and am able to come to a new understanding or a solution. 

“Ah!” he said. “Journaling is your rubber ducky!”

It was my turn to be curious. Slash confused. Say what now?

Jorge explained that when engineers face a problem, they’re often trained to take out a rubber ducky (many of them apparently often keep an actual rubber ducky in their desk) and explain the problem to the duck. 

“If you have a problem that you can’t solve, it’s usually because you don’t understand the problem well enough,” he said. “Explaining the problem out loud to the ducky helps you understand the problem better. Once you fully understand the problem, it is easy to create a solution.”

Brooke (and I) have applied this to problems of fiction writing, as well as life, and found the ducky a surprisingly helpful audience.

Of the stories we tell ourselves, Pascal says, “Things which have most hold on us…are often a mere nothing. It is a nothing which our imagination magnifies into a mountain.”

A literal or figurative ducky can sprinkle a little magic over our mountainous nothings and provide a place to put them where we can see them with proper perspective.

So, too, can a good book.

In Whatever Comes Tomorrow, Rebecca Gardyn Levington (2023) tells overwhelm off in a most lyrical, and beautifully illustrated way (picture books are the BEST):

“Whatever comes tomorrow, however steep the hill…

…you’ll find your path. You’ll journey on. You’ll make it through. You will.”

And Pascal says, “Let us therefore not look for certainty and stability. Our reason is always deceived by fickle shadows; nothing can fix the finite between the two Infinites, which both enclose and fly from it.”

Explain it to your ducky.

May your creativity lead to peace amidst the overwhelm!