Every thought is a story — every sentence, every identity, every idea you put around a situation. And no thought is completely true or completely false. As Joe says, “I can’t find any thought that I have that’s 100% true, and I can’t find any thought that I have that’s 100% false.” The same applies to identity and everything else.
Thoughts by their nature are limited. You cannot paint an accurate portrait of the world with one color, and you cannot describe the world accurately with only the intellect. Any situation can support infinite stories — humanity is destroying nature, humanity is taming nature, humans are the forest fire that helps reseed, humans are what trees invented to put carbon back in the air. Each has beauty and truth; each has lack.
This doesn’t make stories useless — they’re what make us human. After a period of about eighteen months where Joe couldn’t tell stories at all, he came to appreciate their importance. The goal isn’t to eliminate stories but to hold them lightly: “Everything I’ve told you, I’m not attached to it. I can talk about it with an air of certainty, and at the same time it’s completely delusional to me.”