February 4, 2004
Intro to Journeys
Recently, a guy I know said something smart (paraphrasing liberally here):
The best way to reach a person isn’t by teaching, preaching, or arguing. We reach each other by telling our stories.
When I tell my own story, there’s nothing to argue about. Nobody can take my journey, my story, away from us.
That makes sense, don’t you think? It’s hard to preach without wagging a you-shouldn’t-do-that finger at one’s audience. Teaching implies a wiser one talking (down) to a less-wise one. Every argument has its counter-argument.
My rational side needs to see evidence in order to accept something as true, but my common sense side isn’t satisfied until I’ve seen real-life examples.
When I started my journey from not-so-smart drinking patterns to better ones, it made sense to me that people could do so by a variety of methods, but I knew no stories about folks who had.
First-person accounts of turning substance abuse around via abstinence and 12-stepping were plentiful among friends and neighbors, just as they are in the media. Personal references to past excesses were easy to come by, as well.
But to me there seemed to be a deafening silence about how people follow alternate paths to easing away from bad habits and transitioning to more reasonable ones.
(To be honest, I’m self-conscious talking about my own transition. I’d rather not talk about having slipped into unhealthy territory — and certainly won’t dwell on it.)
It’s important for us to share our stories, though. This is where the rubbery gobbledygook of science meets the road. Evidence and theory take on life and breath as we demonstrate what they mean in the fabric of our ordinary lives.
I’ll tell my story. Please feel free to share yours, too. Drop a little (or a lot) into the comments. Shoot me an email message. If you’d like to tell some of your story but hate to write, maybe we can talk by phone and I’ll summarize for the benefit of Live Sensibly readers.
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