We Are Our History

I have a habit of narrating my own story as though it is me. It's a story that only I know, I am the only one who has heard all of it. I can narrate this story because I have some concept of what happened before and what will happen in the future. I narrate mostly because I want it to happen in a particular way.

We narrate the future as though it is past to cement our ideal story. But it will never be. We put clocks on our walls and say that it is time to do this or that, and then we tell stories about the future and past. We don't even know that time exists. Maybe we invented it.

The history that we tell ourselves is false. A truer history is the one which is held right now in the minds of all who have known us and it is based on things we do not know. It is impossible to narrate an accurate history of ourselves. It is a history of whisper down the lane in which each successive individual hangs on to some personal thread of truth. Some people lives their in service of this story, a story that does not exist.

The individual story is much like that of a community, or a nation, or the world, or the universe. And there's us, needing to tell the story for them all. For a nation, this story is called "nationalism" and it's impossible to define just like our own story—just a thread, moving loosely between a million points which some people try desperately to control, but can not.

These histories remain largely a mystery. They depend at any given time on who is there to tell them. The universe is not in a hurry to tell these stories. It is humanity's constant rebirth and rediscovery that fuels this urgency, but it is not urgent, and like you, my story will be forgotten.