The British tell their history differently to the countries they’ve encountered and engaged in their stories.  Jonathan Gottschall calls these our national myths which ‘tell us that not only are we the good guys, but we are the smartest, boldest, best guys that ever were.*  Nations do this to nurture national identity, but it involves a lot of forgetting.  Our memories are selective.

This is also true on a personal level: ‘Your remembered self is your translation of life.’**

Like maps, these myths select, identify, and remember only the things useful for our particular purpose, repressing or ignoring all the other information – which can lead to damaging and even destructive consequences:

“By accepting such premises it becomes easier to see how appropriate they are to manipulation by the powerful in society.”^

It’s a form of selective amnesia.  Whilst we may try to forget bad things about ourselves, we can also forget really good things.  And our maps may help us to get from A to B faster but they don’t help me to focus on the “me” travelling.

‘Life is a matter of becoming fully and consciously who we already are, but it is a self that we largely do not know.  It is as though we are all suffering from a giant case of amnesia.’^^

Like stories, if we only include the positive bits, it’s a poorer story; we need characters to adapt and change, and for this we need the bad bits to be included too.

Dan Ariely points out three “quirks” of ownership: we fall in love with what we own, we focus on what will be lost rather than what will be gained, and, we think others will value what we have as much as we do.*^  Which sounds a lot like the national myths we began with.

To be attentive to what we’re missing will require we find times times when we can stop doing and to stop knowing the things we own in order to see the more.

‘Remember, the artisan soul finds truth in essence, not in information.  It is who we are that is the material for our greatest work of art. From that essence we begin to discover our own voice, and that inner voice is the declaration of our authentic story.’**

(*From Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal.)
(**From Erwin McManus’s The Artisan Soul.)
(^J.B. Harley, quoted in Denis Wood’s The Power of Maps.)
(^^From Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward.)
(*^From Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational.)