I spent most of my childhood clearing paths through woods, swimming in pools, building tree forts, and jumping in creeks. I clocked in endless hours riding bikes, skateboards, and mini bikes through the invented worlds swirling in my imagination. I worked hard at placing myself in a world of crazed friendships that lasted about as long as my ever-changing, specious tales. I would spin these tales in any direction if I thought it would help me keep a friend.

In reality, these tales full of loose threads merely became simple wishes. And it’s here that we find the basis for what I like to call, “Take a Minute Exercises.” In the last issue of Greater Richmond Grid we debuted the first in a series of simple exercises that can be performed anywhere in RVA as a way to stop, slow down, and take in your local surroundings.

By creating an open frame and a meditative mind, all of us can break away from fixations and find our way into a beautiful world.

For this issue, your assignment is to tell a story. In a letter written by Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, he critiqued Tender is the Night: “That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best–make it all up–but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.”

For me, the truth is that I never really boxed ten rounds with a kid in Purcellville. And that scar on my arm, well, I was never shot accidently by a 22 rifle. I never got to third base with Kim. I never successfully jumped the creek on my Schwinn Stingray. And I sure as hell never met Gene Simmons at the Capital Center KISS show.

So what.

These embellished stories were the tools that linked me to a series of friends that would in turn shape my direction for this lovely life of mine.

As I grew older I realized that lying was not essential to keeping a story interesting, and it was certainly not essential in keeping friendships intact. What it did offer, however, was an opportunity to adorn a story with exaggerated emotion and brighter color as a way to guide the listener to a place of self-interpretation. I long to hear and tell stories from punk rock tours, about artists that inspired me, stories from my father, stories about how my mother’s family survived the depression in Brooklyn, NY, stories about unreciprocated love, stories ABOUT love, about family, about kids, and about giving.

For me, these stories are essential to shunning the progression of technology and information that is taking over our lives. Old dilapidated buildings, graffiti-covered trains, and power lines all connect us to our past through metaphor, regret, sorrow, jubilance, success, and failure. Physical, mental, structural, and historic changes have no parameters without the story of their origins. I want to hear these stories always and feel it’s my duty in this world to paint them and share them with my family and with anyone that will listen.

What I’ve learned is that it just doesn’t matter if I exaggerate or elaborate a story a bit-at least I am keeping them alive and still telling them. I can only hope that everyone else will do the same, even if it means they have to exaggerate a bit too.

With this in mind, your “Take a Minute” exercise for this issue of Grid is to go to Globehopper, Lamplighter, Crossroads, or closest local coffee shop and tell a quick story. This story can be about when you first came to Richmond, about something incredible that happened on your last tour, your failed paintings, successful business pitch, your first love, the wreck last year on the Buttermilk Trail, the minnow-sized two-pound bass you caught in the James River, or the person you passed at the Monument Avenue 10k. Or just tell a story about your wife, your kids, or your grandparents.

Then sit back and listen to the other person’s story. You’ll quickly see that telling these stories are a contagion and a perfect place to shut everything down and find your way to great ideas, and new breakthroughs.

We all have this wonderful innate quality to collaborate with others, and our stories are the connectors that bind us universally together. Take a minute to tell a story and listen to a story today. It can be hard, but the rewards are immeasurable.

By Ed Trask