Our existence and our routines blend together and are
fundamentally one and the same; the vast majority of creatures on earth move in
sync with the orbits and rotations of the astral bodies. Of course, life is not an endless string of
identical days and weeks, and it’s never long before something out of the
ordinary happens.
As much as routines are integral to our ways of life, humans
often feel the need to purposefully break the monotony. Every individual will do this to some extent, whether
it be walking down a different street on one’s walk home, feeling the urge to
jump on a plane and visit a far off land, or leaping off a cliff dressed like a
giant rubber squirrel.
In the same way, stories will often follow one, or more, of
a certain number of basic predetermined paths that have existed since
storytelling began. The twists and turns,
the delusions and red herrings, the uncanny characters, intriguing subplots,
mystical locations, and so on, that appear along the way are what make a story
worth reading to the end. The patterns
that we can see in storytelling teach us about the patterns that appear in real
life. They almost set the guidelines for
what we are supposed to be and the expectations for what we are supposed to
become. And they are set from an early
age.
