The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

by Catherine Burns

The tales of how clever we were, how wise, how we won, they mostly fail.

Honesty matters. Vulnerability matters. Being open about who you were at a moment in time when you were in a difficult or an impossible place matters more than anything.

Because we all have stories. Or perhaps, because we are, as humans, already an assemblage of stories. And the gulf that exists between us as people is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin color, gender, race, or attitudes, but we don’t see, we can’t see, the stories. And once we hear each other’s stories we realize that the things we see as dividing us are, all too often, illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are in truth no thicker than scenery.

Sometimes it is easier to try to make sense of the world one story at a time.

In the deepest, blackest night of despair, if you can get just one pinhole of light…all of grace rushes in.

Brave men are always afraid. Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s the willingness—the guts, if you like—to face the fear.