The Stories We Tell
There are a million reasons to feel pretty bleak about life on this planet right now, but I also see reasons to feel hopeful.
That’s because I keep meeting people who are smart and kind, and doing amazing things with their lives. I’ve long held that the thing we most crave is connection with each other – that we are social creatures who yearn for community - and that the way we make these connections is by telling each other our stories.
Sometimes I’m the storyteller, other times I get to hear other people’s stories. And so it was for me in the Deep South on a recent weekend when I travelled first to Invercargill to meet a fabulous group of – mainly women – professionals who get together every few weeks at the iconic Ascot Park Hotel, and then to a weekend festival for rural women in the South Catlins.
“Eat Talk Connect” is organised by the Invercargill Licencing Trust to do exactly those three things – a delicious lunch, a guest speaker, and getting to know your business neighbours. I hear so often from Southlanders about what a great community they have, and these events are surely part of that.
I shared some of my parenting, work and general life stories, and described the ethos I aspire to which is, “Don’t be perfect, be brave”. Women apparently resist putting their hand up unless they are certain they have all the skills required – whereas as men dive in and trust they’ll work it out on the way.
We had a fine old time – all anyone needs to do a good job is for someone to be pleased they turned up, and organiser Nikki Buckley couldn’t have been more welcoming. I would have been happy to hang out with them all day but I had to head another hour south for my next event.
The South Catlin community of Tokanui played host that weekend to a festival for two hundred rural women from all around the motu. I’ve performed at this event before and loved it, and was delighted to be invited back.
As well as doing comedy shows, I had a chance to practice my, “don’t be perfect, be brave” by running a storytelling workshop. It’s something I’ve done a few times, but usually with performers, and I had no idea how this might go with farmers I’d never met before.
They were brilliant. Open, vulnerable, funny, honest and quick to absorb the basics of structure and stage technique. They were also supportive of each other, working together and feeding back.
And then on Saturday night six of them got up on stage in front of the whole festival and told the stories they’d worked on that afternoon. Stories about flyfishing, wedding antics, pregnancy, having ADHD and a remarkable moment in a scholarship interview… In a weekend full of highlights, this was one of the brightest.
And then – bonus - hearing these stories encouraged other women to tell theirs – the rest of the evening was filled with women huddled in pockets, listening intently, laughing uproariously, sharing tales of their lives.
I do not buy the story that we humans are inherently selfish, competitive and hierarchical. I keep observing that our first and guiding impulse is cooperation and community, where our different skills are equally valued and our preference is for cohesion and harmony.
Certainly, it looks a lot like that when you gather women together in a paddock in Southland. And this makes me hopeful for the planet.