In Praise of Losing the Plot

We seem to have lost the plot. This is a very fascinating metaphor. It points to our long and deep connection with story. Story has served us as a tool perhaps since our beginnings as a species. We have employed, and continue to employ, story as a way to see meaning, continuity and resolution in our individual lives and in our collective existence(s). The central element of story is plot. A linear arc of events that is analogous to a physical journey through space. We start “here” and end up “there,” in a different place, either literally, metaphorically, or both. Usually, this journey leads to some kind of transformation, progression, evolution. Even when, as is often the case, particularly in stories from the ancient world, the place of origin and the ultimate destination are the same (”restoration”), there is generally some sort of transformation involved. We return home, but a different person from when we left. We can never be the same again. Older, wiser, perhaps also chastened, impoverished. There is no going back. Home may no longer feel like home. The things that once brought us joy may now turn to ash in our mouth, no longer of value to us. Yet we may have learned to find worth in other things. Letting go of outdated values which no longer serve us, we feel freer, lighter. We may have become more sober, more somber, but also more authentic and rooted. Having discarded the things that weighed us down and diverted our energy, we are now better able to connect with, to carry, to own the values we have discovered. By possessing less, we can be more. We can be present to the moment, no longer locked into a linear, logical progression, enslaved by structure and the endless struggle toward outcomes and results.

Perhaps the very process of linear development ultimately renders itself obsolete. The containment offered by a clearly defined path may function like an egg or a cocoon. Once we emerge from it, we no longer need it. We realize that all we need is what is right here right now in front of us. The scales fall from our eyes and we are struck with the sudden understanding that this is all there is and that’s OK. More than just OK, it’s enough. Now, with fresh eyes, we clearly see that there is no difference between the leaving and the arriving. Like Dorothy, we were always home. We had a story, and, having lived that story, we will always have it, but we are no longer in it, and we don’t need to be. The “plot,” the arc of our travels and travails, our growth and expansion and contraction and transformation, like a vehicle, brought us to just this point. Here, we, and everyone and everything, are just as they are, as they always were. Paradoxically, without the perspective provided by our movement through time and space, we would never have been able to grasp that there really is nowhere to go. Having arrived at this understanding, we now find the arc of story to have become superfluous. In the very process of unfolding, the plot has made itself unnecessary. It contained the seeds of its own destruction all along. We have indeed lost the plot. But we have lost it not the way you lose a precious object, but the way you lose an encumbrance. A volitional act of self-liberation rather than a misfortune: “I finally lost that damned plot that kept weighing me down!” How freeing and empowering!