We are humans and we steer our lives by stories, knowingly or otherwise. For better or worse, we navigate with narrative.
These are the stories we tell ourselves, tell each other, are told to us as children and as adults. Narratives of all kinds are under continuous construction, sometimes poorly, sometimes cleverly designed to define the arc of our consequential existences. They underlie the news we consume, the policies we practice, the sciences we pursue, the ethics we enact, and, of course, they surface like dolphins when we do that stuff called history.
Here, we believe deeply in the importance of having an ‘eye for the tale’. It matters what stories you imbibe and believe. It matters that you can sense the presence of a story to begin with, and can therefore begin to measure its impact upon your psyche and your sense-making.
You wouldn’t be able to, and wouldn’t want to, remove the apparatus of story from your soul—it’s built in. It’s all a part of being human. And making good sense of the narrative sea we swim is not a matter of opting out, anyhow. It’s a matter of opting in. It’s about adult participation, about getting to know the territory so that you can better live there, with pride and strength and responsible care-taking.
Make no mistake, this is adaptive behaviour. Reading, in particular, that old pursuit that is forever new, is a form of creative construction for future need. But imbibing perspective, insight and alternate understandings is, from any form you can find it, urgent work. Our resilience and our capacity to innovate depend on it. It’s the bedrock of critical thinking, imaginative empathy, and the capacity to form connective mental tissue.
In that spirit, we are humbly building An Eye for the Tale, our platform for the written word within the larger We Are Humans Project. We’ll be offering up essays, articles, stories and blog posts, as and when we are able to make them. There will be pieces that are complex, others simple; some literary, some loose. Macro and micro analysis. The profane and, hopefully, the profound. We hold with old-school literary aspirations as well as modern work-arounds, and we respect both long and short attention spans.
We'll be publishing to a rough schedule but reserve the right to deviate.
In any case, we'll be coming up with stuff, and we hope you like it.
(We produce our own material, but will gratefully receive and publish contributions where they are fit for our purpose and satisfy our sense of quality. For a copy of our contributor’s guidelines, email hi@wearehumans.com.au)
