Sorting Your Story Currents
Naming your touchstones is a little bit like picking up your shovel and opening the door.
Sorting these touchstones into story currents, that’s like the moment you begin to scoop. Once you’re in contact with the snow, you realize very quickly that it’s not all the same. Many people know that the Inuit people have multiple words for snow, but few people pause to consider that in a landscape covered with snow for most of the year, having several words for snow is effective. They’re using the technology of their indigenous language to support their survival in a landscape most cultures would consider uninhabitable.
Like your snow, you need to know the emotional currents in your personal story intimately to decide how to navigate them effectively.
The top layer is fresh and fluffy.
The newest events, like the newest snow, are the easiest to resolve. Since it hasn’t been there long enough to pack down under its own weight, it’s light and unattached.
You can clear a lot in a short amount of time, which often reveals the tougher layers beneath.
This is a little like a helping current. It gives you a boost to see the swift results of your progress.
The next layer is packed but brittle.
Snow packs down under its own weight. Untended emotions can also calcify the longer you leave them. It’s a little crusty, but when you push your shovel into it, it breaks apart easily into crumbling blocks.
It’s denser than the fluffy snow of the top layer. You’ll need a little muscle to move it, but snow sculptures are made from this kind of snow. You can dump your shovelfuls straight over the porch railing, or if it’ll entertain you, you can make something from it first.
This is like a honing current. It’s going to require muscle either way, but you’re growing in skill.
The deepest layer is also the oldest. It may require extra tools and time.
Beneath the crusty snow is the layer that has been frozen the longest. Some of it may actually be ice, attached to the porch’s surface.
In my experience, you can unpack some of it on your own. You might need to use something harder than your shovel to break it up. You might be tempted to scatter salt to rush the melting process.
But to force it to come up completely, before it’s ready, might damage the structure underneath. It might be best to wait till spring, trusting that the sun’s return will melt what you couldn’t remove.
This is most like the eddying currents, the ones that require the most finesse to maneuver. Force won’t help you as much as self-awareness, patience, and timing.
The good news is that most of the weight on the porch resides in the top two layers. Even if we just get as far as our honing and helping currents, we’ll relieve the pressure of excess weight and regain use of the porch, renewing our capacity.
For that last layer, those eddies, we may have to wait for the sun’s help, but we can still better understand what we’re looking at. Understanding some of the themes in your life will only help you navigate them with more skill and courage.
Next, we will go over each of these currents in more depth.
If you would like to get a head start, you can return to your list of touchstones (from the worksheet on this page), and for each one, you can begin to ask yourself: Does this feel like a helping current, a honing current, or an eddy?
If you want to learn more about story currents through a character arc, a personal one or a fictional one, I wrote about them in People Are Stories-in-Progress.
