Everyone likes a good story. We like to be transported away, we like to be entertained. Time stands still when I get lost in a great novel with a cup of tea by my side.
But stories can do so much more than entertain us. They can provide a mirror for something we go through or need, like when we commiserate with the heroine or long to experience what she goes through. Then the story provides emotional support. Stories inspire us to muse and ponder and philosophize, perhaps to see things differently, perhaps to stretch our imagination and mind.
Another very important aspect of story telling, of creating a narrative, is to knit a culture or events together, creating meaning, making sense. Not all of us can see a pattern when we are walking through the woods and seeing all those individual trees. But once someone flies a drone above the trees, or climbs on a tower, so to speak, and sees the whole of it as a forest, sharing that narrative helps all of us to see the bigger picture.
Creation stories ground a culture in a narrative base. Cultural beliefs are a story that informs how people think about something (that mainstream medicine thinks of the body in a mechanical way is a narrative that informs our healing methods; when we change the narrative the healing methods will change, too). Traditional fairytales teach us about good and bad, and that light always triumphs over darkness. Without stories things seem random and our human mind needs patterns. Nature changes all the time and doesn't need patterns, at least not human patters of orderliness. We do. We create meaning and context through stories and narrative.
