Living a Hundred Lives

First of all— Tumbler, sad-face emoticon when I write the wrong log-in, really? I dunno. 

But more to the point: I’m close to the end of an amazing book, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, and came across a passage that made me think about Storybox: 

“It was a night of dreams. I was playing roles, one after another, against Saul, who was playing roles. It was like being in a play, whose words kept changing, as if a playwright had written the same play again and again, but slightly different each time. We played against each other ever man-woman role imaginable. As each cycle of the dream came to an end, I said: “Well, I’ve experienced that, have I, well it was time that I did.” It was like living a hundred lives. I was astonished at how many of the female roles I have not played in life, have refused to play, or were not offered to me” (pg 576). 

There are two things I love from this passage: one is her idea of the value of experience for it’s own sake. To me, this is also one of the tenants of Storybox. It goes beyond a call to compassion from an audience member, to allow whoever wants to truly live in another world, a kind of waking dream that you control, facilitated by the ensemble.

The second thing I noted in this passage was the idea that she had refused certain roles in life, able to play them only in her dreams. I think all of us experience that to some extent; for whatever reason, we deemed certain roles and personalities unacceptable, shunned them and never came to know them. But in fact, we all know, and are all to some extent capable of, all roles of mankind. To paraphrase what a great mentor said to me, “when we free ourselves from judgement, people will emerge to speak to us who we are shocked to discover have been living in us.”

This is Storybox!

Sarah-Doe