Sometimes an indirect or illogical or apparently irrelevant story can make a powerful point.
I was watching a rerun of an old TV show I used to love, Boston Legal, in my hotel room the other night. Alan, one of the main characters told a young lawyer struggling to win a case that when he gets stuck for how to close his case, he simply tells the jury a story, about anything, about something in his life. And so she took his advice.
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| My hotel room in Skopje Macedonia |
She told the jury about how once as a teenager her pet chocolate Labrador had turned up in the kitchen with the neighbour’s pet dead rabbit in her mouth. Horrified, she had washed and cleaned the dead rabbit and placed it back in its cage at the neighbours home hoping they would think it died of natural causes. The next day her parents told her how the neighbours had come to visit, dreadfully upset that an apparent ‘nutcase’ had dug up their rabbit that had passed away from old age from a place where they had buried it in the woods. It had been cleaned up they said, and put back in its cage.
The lawyer was making her point in the defence of someone accused of theft where the logical answer was that the accused man was guilty, but she wanted to assert that perhaps the illogical version of events was true, and question whether there was reasonable doubt in the jury’s mind. She won the case.
She knew her why behind telling the story, that was actually fictional and an urban legend, but she told it to show how the truth really can be stranger than fiction. And that our assumptions are not always correct.
It had me thinking as I was travelling about the stories I would tell about my adventures. Sometimes this is confronting to me. I want to look good, have the most amazing adventures, face down danger, go where no man has gone before. But sometimes I simply want a holiday. I need to know the why in the stories I will tell to achieve an end for others. As it happened apart from the odd inevitable meltdown on the road travelling alone, I had an awesome time ! And my stories are many and varied, unexpected, and at times adventures occurred where you would least expect them.