Keep Wondering

"Family, friends say Uvalde shooter had troubled home life, was bullied for a speech impediment and lashed out in recent years."

"Prime minister says communities have 'right to be angry' after tense appearance at Kamloops memorial."

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Dear Kate,

Two news headlines still evolving, one in your land, one mine, with similar narrative drive to move the stories forward, satisfy two essential needs in their readers: curiosity and concern.

According to Robert Mckee, curiosity is our intellectual need to find answers to our questions, concern our emotional need to experience positive outcomes.

But how does it work when we are telling the stories backward, knowing already the not-too-edifying endings, and now having to go forward with the broken pieces in our hands?  To what further ends will then our stories be satisfying to our intellect and emotion?  What more is there to know for us to know better, know deeper, know truer?  Where do we find the possibilities to speak again about justice and love, beauty and hope, redemption and restoration?

I will leave you with these questions.  You might not notice, but these are questions you've been always asking yourself, propelling your life story forward.  At times you would meet a bad end, even a dead end, so it seems to you, only to find yourself waking up the next morning to keep writing the story, denying not your irrefutable defeat but the fatefulness and fatalness of it, asking for one more chance to right the wrong, re-member the dismembered, resurrect the dead.

We could also ask ourselves the question behind these questions: How do we want these story, our life stories, to end?  What we are seeking to finally find should be what we have been picking up all along our path, elements to build our story to that particular end.

So when we hear "horrifying" conspiracy theories swirling around the Texas shooting, we must wonder about the vision we are seeing in ourselves, in the prospect of our civilization, the same way we should when we find ourselves explaining away people and things to make our lives answerable to our ends.  And when we hear how anger is a "right," a privilege to exercise, we must wonder then to what end is anger - and with it, violence, justifiable, how much of it, burning how deep and for how long, and where do we find the possibility to speak again from the ruins about forgiveness and grace?

Don't stop wondering.

Yours, Alex