I have some really insightful conversations with friends and family in the car. We are cocooned I guess and it’s surprising what comes up.
Last week I dropped my mother at the airport. She has heard me talk a little about my interest in story. She told me about her Christian discussion group and how they had been talking about how narrative and metaphor had been lost in Christianity and been replaced by doctrine. She found it sad that the magic and learnings from bible stories was often misinterpreted and turned into narrow sets of rules for living. There had even been emotional debate about Jesus and whether he was completely divine and a God, or a fallible human. We both agreed that these sorts of either/or conversations are really just academic, and that there is no right answer.
The synchronicity of this was fascinating as I have been looking at the same loss in the Maori world, where academia is for the elders stealing, and intellectualising their culture. The story, the meaning, and the soul is lost in translation.
I recall vividly the red pen markings and cynical margin comments on several university essays I wrote for using a journalistic writing style and the other for including unsourced references to Maori culture. So again as TS Elliot said, where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
I have some great philisophical conversations with other family members in the car, and then on other occasions I can be consumed by road rage, at the behaviour of another driver, often for a maneuver I may have well done myself even earlier the same day. Irrational completely.
In that little box on wheels that I spent more time in than I would like, a whole world can occur; stories profound, petty, or problematic, but stories non-the-less.