Pink: Story
I am still really enjoying reading this book. Though it was written for the business world, I think that it also lies in a perfect niche within the arts. This chapter, about the idea of story, details how narratives are, and have always been, important tools for humanity. Stories are...'Our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining...Most of our experience, our knowledge and our thinking is organized as stories (101).' In other words, story is a classification system for human beings. In the art realm, stories do the same. They are a means of communication to recite the artist's allegory to the viewer. The viewer, then, interprets those ideas and relates them to their own experiences to create a new and meaningful story. Though Pink talks about the importance of narrative in the Conceptual Age, he also states that factual thinking is still valuable: "Storytelling doesn't replace analytical thinking...it supplements it by enabling us to imagine new perspectives and new worlds (108).' In this way, storytelling really requires a lot of empathy. Pink discussed the work of Dr. Rita Charon, who developed a program for doctors that incorporated narrative in order to enable doctors to feel more empathetic toward their patients. This reminded me a lot of the brief presentation in class on empathy and what it might be like to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes. I think that story and empathy need each other to exist because stories depend upon emotion and viewer response. Without empathy, stories would not be as effective or as powerful. "Stories...provide--context enriched by emotion, a deeper understanding of how we fit in and why that matters (115)." These two ideas, story and empathy, as essential to each other and essential to the world in the future.
"We are each the authors of our own lives."
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