Shattering All Our Stories

   I wonder if you have ever had the experience before where everything you thought you knew was completely shattered... to the point where even your ability to make new stories is not operable anymore. I suppose this happens most often with trauma survivors. In the absence of a truly safe holding space or trust in a working order of the universe, one loses faith in a reliable story from which to draw. People who have been maimed by abusive conditions, violence or war, must at some point have suffered the debilitating loss of ability to soothe oneself through the healing power of story or personal narrative. When something truly terrible or incomprehensible has happened to a person, no story can somehow make sense of it. It remains a void space that cannot find closure in the mind.
   What I am describing here is a very extreme form of what happens in everyday life on more subtle levels. For instance, we think that a co-worker said one thing, but after a period of trying to figure out why they said this or not-this, we come to realize that they didn't say 'that thing' after all! It was only a creation of the mind. In times like these, one starts to doubt the ability to frame a workable story about what a person is really 'meaning', due to an absence in reliable interpretation. Of course, eventually, people work out workable interpretations of self and others...otherwise, the world would be pretty chaotic indeed, and no communication would likely be possible. At the very least, people come to trust that the universe at least in part mirrors some experience within themselves.
   The 'bottom-falling-out' experience of daily life is what gives rise to dukkha, a sense of dis-ease that prevails over a person's experience and consciousness. It is what happens in minuscule ways when a person's miniature model or framework of carefully-spun expectations suddenly begins to yield to a present-day circumstance that somehow refuses to fit that scheme of things. It is truly new in that sense, and there isn't any way to rebuild over it using one's familiar or habitual scaffolding. But does this mean that humans give up on their ability to create and build interpretations of the world?
    I don't think that a Buddhist would argue that it is necessary to refrain from interpreting the world, even if that interpretation is wobbly and tentative. But a Buddhist might see the meaning and underlying intent of interpretation differently. For instance, rather than seeing interpretation as a doorway to infallible truth, Buddhists tend to see them as vehicles which are designed to allow the mind to arrive at a certain place, at which point they are no longer required. I think the purpose of interpretation, in that sense, is to enrich one's experience through a synthesizing, 'constructive' act of compassion. And this compassion is not a grand scheme that is already pre-formed and uniformly distributed. Rather, it is a kind of state of moment-to-moment responding to the needs of others.
     Perhaps the best use of stories is not to 'string together' one's own identity (which is illusory) but to reinforce and provide bridges between people. Stories can be used to inspire, to encourage, and to uplift people, but perhaps they are best not over-invested with too much meaning, since they will change over time. So I do believe that one should approach interpretation with a kind of passionate sang-froid: a will to engage stories, but without the sentimental attachment to stories.