Stories from a slice

As I watched a jogger slow to a walk, I wondered what I often wonder from time to time — perhaps have even written about: what’s this moment I’m seeing?

Is he at the end of a short run? Is he finishing a long run? Maybe a 10K? Is he taking a short break before starting again? Maybe he had just been sprinting …

The truth was outside my scope. I only had the story I had invented based on a tiny sliver of time.

And this is like so many experiences in life. We catch an infinitesimal piece of someone’s life. A note within a symphony. And we build a story around what we think we’ve witnessed.

And sometimes I bet we get some of it right. But more often, we surely get it wrong on many counts.

We are storytellers. We’re inventors. It’s part of our nature. But it’s also useful to be conscious of this quality of our creative minds. The stories we tell — based on what we think we see — are stories we’ve written. And it’s easy to end up with more fiction than fact.