Never Mistake Narrative For Truth

“All the busy little creatures
Chasing out their destinies
Living in their pools
They soon forget about the sea…”

From Natural Science by Rush

A narrative is an explanation of the truth. It is necessarily a simplistic explanation since reality is beyond our ability to fully understand with our little minds. Narratives can be quite useful for us humans to help us navigate around a large and largely unknowable universe. In fact, they are indispensable to us, as we would not be able to function in the complex societies we have created without them. Even the most primitive of societies use narrative to sustain themselves.

The danger is that, living and functioning in such narratives, we forget that they are merely tools and begin to accept them for reality itself. Finding a workable narrative, we tend to settle into it and forget the larger world. This might work for a while so long as the variables do not change. But things are always changing*. To forget that the narrative we operate within is but a mere story we tell ourselves is to be wed to a semi-truth, to be rigid in times of crisis, to be unable to find alternatives to the way we’ve been doing things when change becomes necessary.