Where do stories come from?

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”

Muriel Ruykeser.

Ever since we were children, stories are where we go when we are confused. Stories make sense of things by taking random and often scary events and imposing some order and destiny on them in a few hundred pages, or better still, around a fire over an hour or so.

Right now, if we're not confused, I suggest we're not thinking enough. Day after day, we are showered with news and opinions designed to position us. At one end, we have the doom-mongers, and at the other, the effusive but hardly credible stream of how we are being presented with "unparalleled opportunities" in Asia Pacific, or how we are going to become, almost overnight, a "scientific superpower". Meanwhile, we sit here wondering how our job will fare in the changes, how our children's education will help them, or about our parents' care. Much more prosaic, much more real, and the stories we are told don't help. We are facing chronic story misalignment.

So where I…