A Great Journey

When I was twenty, I took a trip to England and Ireland with my good friend Chris. It was my first time abroad, and there was so much brand new to me about the experience: buying things with English pounds, sleeping in a B&B, visiting Trafalgar Square with its flocks of pigeons, traveling by ferry across the Irish sea on a stormy November night, playing snooker with a kid whose accent was so thick I hardly understood a word he said, seeing ruined castles by the road with the same frequency as dilapidated barns in rural America. When I returned, my family gathered with me around our kitchen table and said: “Okay, let’s hear the stories.”

It was a natural request. We were a family of storytellers. I loved hearing them and I loved telling them. I was always scouring my day for one interesting morsel of a moment from which I could spin a tale. And yet, as I sat there, filled with over two weeks of travel, I hardly knew where to start. There was all this stuff that happened, but what was the story? I rattled off something about the pigeons who’d land in your hand when you bought bag of feed, and seeing the actual Tower of London where queens and kings were executed once upon a time, and how incredibly green Ireland truly was . . . but I bored halfway through. I left off feeling as if I’d failed them somehow.

What I actually loved most about the trip was how I laughed when Chris realized a 2P coin was Tuppence, and that this was most British thing he’d ever held in his hand; and standing on the bow of that ferry in the wild winter dark feeling the spray from waves I could hear but not see; and the night I got food poisoning in Dublin and wrote a letter in my journal to a girl I loved but hadn’t seen in two years, and how that soothed me somehow. I didn’t really care about the rest of the stuff, at least not yet.

It’s so easy to mistake your life for all the things that happened to you. But storytelling teaches us that our life is what we notice about all that we do and occurs around us, what stays with us, what nags at us or inspires us or frightens us. Everything else is a backdrop on the stage, interchangeable as the drama unfolds. After all, you don’t have to cross the Atlantic to take a great journey; we all go on one every time we get up in the morning and begin the search for what interests us most.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com