SMALL THINGS FROM THE LIFE OF A STRANGER

I’m an amateur photographer and years ago I started writing stories with a premise in mind.

Photos have a place of importance in our lives… they record our kids, places we’ve visited, people we know, events that are important to us, and on and on. Yet the temporal content of those photos is tiny to the point of insignificance. The shutter clicks and what results is an image that represents perhaps 1/250th of a second in a day that has twenty-two million such instances of time.

That picture is a tiny part of all the reality that makes up a life, let alone what makes up a day, or even a second in that day. Yet still, a photo can be compelling, memorable, and important.

So why, I thought, should a story have greater ambitions than a photograph? Imagine a detail of your conscious experience — maybe a detail that includes a tree, maybe a leaf on that tree, maybe the last leaf on that tree as winter approaches and it’s falling to the ground.

Write about that. That’s a story. That’s significant.

And so I did. Over the few years of that exercise I acquired thousands of readers all over the world interested in small things from the life of a stranger.

Among the things I learned from that experience was this — if you ask someone, “What happened today? What did you see? What did you do?” and then they answer, “Oh, nothing much, same old, same old.” Their absence of response isn’t because nothing happened, nor does it mean their lives are meaningless and without content.

The real issue is that life comes to all of us like a perpetual waterfall, and most of us don’t have the attention or patience to look beyond that waterfall and see the single drop of water — and then once we see that drop of water to wonder at its meaning.

For good stories, at their heart, are about appreciating the finite and the ephemeral as a means of understanding the infinite and the eternal. A story is never about the ocean, it’s about the tiniest part that can cling together and make a single drop.

Stories are about that one drop as it courses down a windowpane, meets another drop, coalesces, and becomes a single drop again, and then falls to the ground only to wait for the sun to call it from the earth and transform it into a cloud.

Yes, within that tiny drop of water is an ocean’s worth of meaning.