STORIES

I am a runner. As a runner, I know other runners, whether I have ever met them or not. We who run are part of a community of like-minded souls. We understand one another. I stand with the runners of Boston in defiance of the attack on an event that has long shown the world all the very best things about running. If ever a wrong event was chosen to terrorize, however, it was a marathon. We runners are a gritty, never-say-die lot. We are determined. We persevere. We endure. Our spirit can be bruised, but it will never be broken. We know what it means to travel to the outer limits of pain and then to return. Again and again. If weather and aches and pains and blisters and heat and cold and sweat and all the people who are always asking if we are crazy and who flip us off and play chicken with us in their cars will not stop us, then neither will your careless violence or anything else. So, just understand. This is the way it is.

As we try and process yet another horrific and senseless and violent tragedy that has seized our attention and our collective grief, I am taken by the fact that as these kinds of events unfold we are drawn, with seeming helplessness, to the unceasing coverage of them. Whether it be through social media or online news or television news, we find ourselves transfixed for a time as the same few facts and images are presented over and over. We become immobilized. We stand with open mouths and shaking heads and muttered curses while the business of our daily lives comes to a quick halt.

Part of it, I might suppose, is our need to feel some sense of the immense grief of our fellow humans, to act upon our basic connection to them in the only way we can -- by paying attention -- and perhaps also, in a small way, to be reminded that our own lives were spared from something that cannot be predicted. In our sorrow for those we do not know, we are a little more grateful for our own lives and the people in it.

I might suggest that what we are also drawn to the stories. Stories of survivors, of heroism, of those who faced the unimaginable, and of tragic and needless carnage. I think often of how important stories are to us, even the stories of true horror. It seems to me such a basic human thing to tell stories, and I cannot help but be amazed at how long we have been doing it. Imagine how telling stories has shaped us as a species, how it has moved us along and civilized us, how telling stories has taught us elemental things like where the food is or how we will catch it or how to heat it up. And think, too, of how telling stories has given meaning to the things we cannot fathom or explain, how it has spread ideas and questions and how it has bound cultures and nations. The stories we have told and will tell to one another help us to see the beauty in the world and also all that makes it ugly and nasty and that makes living in it wondrous and glorious and so difficult that we must make up other realities sometimes to try and understand our own.

I have been wanting to share with you for a while now a piece by Bruce Feiler published in the New York Times last month. In The Stories That Bind Us, Feiler discusses psychological research that showed that the biggest predictor of the emotional health and happiness of children was a clear and strong family narrative. A story of us, in other words. Imagine it, time around the dinner table or simply a few minutes here and there spent talking and sharing stories of how we came to be might just, as Feiler contends, be "the single most important thing you can do for your family." Children who had the most self-confidence and who were most resilient were the ones who heard and came to know a family narrative along the lines of we have had ups and downs, there have been good times and tough times, but we have hung in there and we have seen one another through. Such a story allows children to see that they belong to something larger than themselves, just like stories do for each of us. They help us make sense of things that otherwise we cannot.