Life as Narrative: Curiosity & the Arc of Change
For the past few weeks, I've had a delicious morning ritual: drinking a cup of cardamom black tea while reading a small and stunning guide to narrative nature writing.
This morning, I was reading the chapter on narrative arc, which the author, Kathryn Aalto, defines as "the architecture of curiosity about change." I loved this—sighed, in fact, when I read it.
The architecture of curiosity about change. This could be a descriptor of the arc of our lives, couldn't it?
When I was eighteen, I spent four months in the Middle East. It was a completely life-changing experience. While there, I continuously found myself seeing what I was experiencing through the lens of narrative; it was like being a character in a book, except I was living it. The remarkable quality of what I was living allowed me to step outside my normal perception of myself, and to see that the magic of narrative arc—what I loved about reading narrative nonfiction and fiction—was actually the magic of my daily life. I could suddenly see that I was living a story.
This way of seeing has stayed with me. Whenever life is feeling a little dull, I step back and try to feel myself once again as a "character" in my own life, to witness my life as a story, and suddenly, I feel myself re-engaging, seeing more deeply, experiencing more richly. This stepping back into narrative allows me to see life for the wonder it is.
Story is central to being human. Narrative comes in all shapes and sizes, fictitious and real, poetic and prosaic, and we are constantly—whether we realize it or not—narrating our own stories inside our heads. What I love about reading and writing is that it makes this narration conscious; it gives us a choice about what we're narrating and how.
Writer & teacher Kathryn Aalto's definition of narrative arc as "the architecture of curiosity about change" is, to me, such an empowering definition of why reading and writing and story matter so much—whether that story comes in the form of nonfiction, fiction, poetry, film, art, or the daily experience of our lives, narrative is what fuels our experience and interpretation of being alive. When we become conscious of that—whether as writers, readers, or simply as human beings—it can profoundly deepen and enrich our experience of being alive.
Intentionally interacting with the narrative arc of our experience—through fictional or nonfictional means—can change the course of our lives. That's a big statement, but I truly believe it—in part because I have experienced it myself. It's one reason I chose to shift my practice in the direction of embodied inquiry for the writing process: because I believe that empowering writers to engage with this "architecture of change" from an embodied place can have real effects on the life of that writer—and the lives of those she chooses to share with.
