I was shocked and saddened when a friend of mine who has written the Blog: Breast Cancer Eh! recently revealed that she has received a terminal diagnosis.  After struggling and being fully transparent with her messy fight with cancer, she was in effect saying a farewell and preparing us all.

 Quite frankly I was stunned by the news, then doubly stunned by something else that was happening internally.  You know that feeling when it seems like a light bulb literally lights you up?  I suddenly felt animated and yes, illuminated, and somehow lighter as if this idea had beams shining out of it onto some hidden alter inside my head.  Pay attention!  The equivalent of flashing lights, sirens, alarm bells plus horns all went off. 

  “Oh no, the stories that will go with her”! 

Stories provide a conduit for past experiences and sensations to be re-experienced.  They help us make sense of the world.   Just this morning I heard the story from a fellow who came to Saudi Arabia on business and was housed on the King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals (KFUPM).  The University was adjacent to the Saudi Aramco compound, where I lived in for fifteen years and is the geographical location where many of the stories in Life in the Camel Lane: Embrace the Adventure occurred. 

 This fellow had come on business to KFUPM to design and build a physics lab for the University and was there for one week.   His perceptions upon arriving in Saudi and seeing fully covered abaya wearing ladies, who were not permitted to drive, was disrupted when he peered through the fence into the Aramco compound.   There he witnessed possibly myself or my friends wearing shorts, driving cars and generally living life as if we were back in the West.

 In the act of delivering that short story, it took me back to Life in the Camel Lane, but it also gave me a clear perspective of what it was like to be on the grounds of the neighboring University looking into our compound as if it were a fishbowl and how I swam around in those waters so naturally for so many years.

 The power of story connects us and helps us make sense of life on so many levels.  This story I heard today immediately transported me to another time and place and actually revealed another layer regarding that lifestyle, that up until today I had never examined.  Stories help us look at an event and twirl it like a globe to examine different aspects and learn from them.

 If your stories are not encouraged to step into the limelight and to be reenacted on paper and shown the light of day, they fail to illuminate or transmit values, opinions nor history.  Please tell your stories.  If you have life lessons to communicate then please by all means do so with all the passion and purpose you can muster.  We need stories and they need us, please don’t leave with them locked inside your brain!