Our Stories; Our Power

Is it just another among the untold millions of stories we tell each other throughout our lives? Or is it instead an extraordinary explanatory power that we all-too-rarely are privileged to experience first hand? We can and we do make up our stories as we go; inserting a slightly different ending, a subtle variation in the details in the telling and the retelling, first here, then there. And of course sometimes these stories that we pass down, we insist, must be accepted at face value, without question.

But real, honest inquiry always skeptically tests and measures and experiments. Validity thus insists upon something more in return for our trouble and for the risk involved in asking difficult questions. And if we do actually manage to go far enough then we may; we may, be offered at least a tiny glimmer of a passably rational provisional explanation, instead of simply just one more well-worn story among the millions of others. 

All of human knowledge then essentially amounts to a gathering and a blending together of all our collective stories over time. But these stories that survive the tests of time are unlike all the others. Because in the end these special stories are themselves fully capable of withstanding the hard tests and the blinding light of a focused, intense, utterly remorseless examination as we attempt to inch our way down a faint path in the general direction of what will ultimately be proven to be absolute truth.