story is an account of events, real or imagined, told so that they hold together — a narrative with a teller, a sequence, and a meaning the telling gives it.
The word dates to about 1200, from Anglo-French storie and Old French estoire, shortened from Latin historia, "account, tale." Story and history were one word in Middle English and separated only in the sixteenth century, when history kept the sense of a factual record and story drifted toward the imaginative tale. The sense of a floor of a building, from about 1400, traces to the same Latin word, possibly through the painted windows or carved scenes that once ran along each level of a façade.
Story sits close to narrative, which stresses the structure and act of telling, and to 📝myth, a story held as foundational because it carries a people's worldview. In everyday speech story also means a news report, a rumor, a falsehood told to cover something, or the account a person gives of their own life — senses that share the idea of events arranged by someone, for someone.
📝Charles Eisenstein widens the word in 📝The Ascent of Humanity, where nations, laws, and sciences are themselves stories, and 📝Storyteller Consciousness is the awareness that the stories we tell create the reality we see. In that usage the aim is not to escape stories but to tell them consciously.
"Like the broader, cultural stories, they enslave us only to the extent that they are unconscious. I am advocating the enlightenment and not the abolition of our stories. Yes, we can come back to the present moment, the present experience, and release all judgment if we so choose." ~ 📝Charles Eisenstein, 📝The Ascent of Humanity, 📝Storyteller Consciousness
The stories that we live are the stories that we tell. On 📝My Storyboard I relabeled projects as stories, and in 📝We Are One I let 📝The Journey To One end as a story that no longer served, so the 📝One Inc story could begin.