I believe telling stories to people about how to spot and escape predators is important. We need to hear stories about villains so that we can learn how to protect ourselves and our children from evil and wickedness, the very real bad characters out there who can hurt us. But we also need to hear stories about honor, dignity and bravery and the equally real heroes out to help us--so that we can learn to reach up and step into their shoes.
In a conversation exercise yesterday in Advanced Performance class, I recollected a moment from twenty-five years ago that I had never bothered to contemplate as anything more than a small personal anecdote with no significance beyond my own remembered experience. But as I thought back through the story, I started to realize that perhaps what and who I had encountered wasn’t just an average man making honest mistakes, but rather one who ultimately decided to behave like a prince. The OED describes the colloquial American usage of “prince” as “an admirable and generous person” (origin--1911), but the Latin is a combination of “primus”—“first” and “capere”—“to take” for a literal meaning of “to take first.” And in my memory, this person’s honorable behavior won him that distinction, and now I see him operating as an archetype around which I can build a story that would have meaning to lives and experiences beyond my own.
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