The speaker was only 15 years older than the graduates she addressed, so they listened attentively. In a quiet yet forceful voice, she described being scared to knock on the door of the first house she would visit as a 20 year-old candidate for state office. What was she thinking? She is now a Congresswoman, a war veteran, poised, proud and humble, a rising star nationally in her party. She was once scared?
The kids and the rest of us were hooked by her story.
Days later, another graduation speaker. She told us she was not going to make a speech but would just speak to us. She unveiled her story: abused as a child, she found safe haven and confidence at the school whose graduates she now addressed. Incredibly, sexual violence visited her again in college. She was devastated. She is now an accomplished, articulate, effective veteran national leader in the movements to end domestic violence and other forms of abuse.
More drama in this story. Odds that seem daunting yet morphing into a story of triumph. Her “just speaking” was a powerful speech.
A professor of Mom’s once assured her class that every person’s life provided a story worth knowing. All that was needed was the telling or the writing. No need to be a member of Congress or national CEO to have a story worth knowing. Every person, he said.
I don’t know every person. But every person I’ve ever taken the time to query and listen to has, in fact, had a story containing something worth knowing, even if the story described the everyday, the routine, the quotidian (can’t resist that word!).
At one of Dad’s churches, there was a man named Tom Hatfield. On Sunday, Tom was one of the crowd, a 70+ year-old guy in a rumpled tan suit who didn’t socialize much on account of his being shy. Every Saturday, Tom Hatfield mowed the lawn around the church. So, every Sunday, the church looked cared for.
I never knew what Tom had done for a living or what family he might have had. I was just a teenager. But I learned from Tom Hatfield the value of “the little unremembered acts of kindness and of love” Wordsworth described, and Dad preached about to a congregation that might not have thought much about how the grass got mowed every week. Tom had a story; he was the story.
The best history teachers tell stories. No surprise there. Not every story makes the history books. But every story can still teach, and engage in a way dates and date do not.
Once, sitting on a bench at a retirement community waiting for a friend, I engaged a resident who informed me that he was the creator of the Pink Panther. I pumped him for more information, and he educated me about life in Hollywood. Maybe he was the creator and I had lucked out in engaging him in conversation. Or maybe he was not, and he was choosing to live a fantasy into which he had invited me for a moment. Either way, I learned something.
Have you had a crossroads moment where you made a choice that has shaped your life since? What drama has there been in your love life, your professional career, your child-rearing, your military service, and so on? What lessons lie in your story?
Our stories—yours and mine—are unique but connect to the larger human experience. That wonderful paradox: we are individuals part of a whole with a past, present and future. Through our stories, we contribute some bit of understanding to the education of the young and those not so young whose education never ends. If we tell them.
When Tom Hatfield died, the church lawn did not get mowed as much.
The CEO found her way back from anger, guilt and despair by volunteering to help others at a critical time in the life of her city.
The Congresswoman remembered a challenge from her parents: if you see something amiss, what are YOU going to do about it. She rang the doorbell, convinced that her desire to engage in public service was not about her but about the service she wanted to provide to others.
What is your story? To whom have you told it? If not yet, when?