your story

Stories are powerful. And I think we all have a story to tell. Some stories are long, as long as a lifetime. But then there are short stories. Stories in the every day.

My best friend, Alysha, and I started driving right around the time the first Starbucks opened up in Tyler. One of our favorite things to do was to drive (our parent’s minivans…) to Starbucks and just hang out. We loved the environment. We didn’t go for the coffee. In fact, most of the time we were too broke to buy coffee so we would just get a cup of water for free. Starbucks has good water. It’s triple filtered.

We would sit and talk and people watch and laugh a lot. We always seemed to laugh a lot together. Sometimes we met new people at Starbucks. Weird people. Nice people. Interesting people. Old people. Young people. It was an interesting crew that hung out at Starbucks.

I remember this one particular group of guys we talked to one night. They were a bit older than us, probably in their 20’s. They told us about how they tried to make a story out of every single day. One time they swam across a lake, just so they could tell the story.

Those guys inspired Alysha and me. We always wanted to make a story, and we did just that. We would tell our stories to anyone who would listen- and in fact it was probably very hard to listen to most of our stories because we were almost always laughing so hard that we could barely get the story out. We could make a story out of anything. One of our very best stories was the story about the time Alysha’s calculator fell out of our locker. It’s a classic. Ask me about it sometime, I’ll tell you the story.

In high school, being adventurous with my best friend, it was easy to find a story. But now, it’s a little bit harder. When I see people I haven’t seen in a while, they say, “Hey! What have you been up to?” And I usually reply with, “Ohhh, nothing.” And then there’s that awkward silence where they expect me to say more but I don’t have more to say. Sometimes I follow up with, “Well, I hang out with Leeland all day. And clean the house. And go to the gym….” Lather, rinse, repeat. Or at least that’s what it feels like. Lame.

Here’s the deal. I know the story is there. I just have to find it. It’s all about the way you look at things. I mean, come on… a calculator falling out of a locker? Not quite so riveting. But Alysha and I turned it into a story. And a rather humorous one at that.

What is your story? Find today’s story. If it’s not there, create it. Even if your life feels like it’s following the directions on the shampoo bottle. There’s a story hiding in there.