When Stories get exhausted

“Stranger than Fiction” shows a writer with writer’s block.  The way she smokes her cigarettes makes me think of an addict who is in dispair but can’t stop.  The spirit of change that enters her life is like that of someone who has lost faith in the storyline of her life.  It reminds me of Eckhart Tolle’s account in The Power of Now of how he fell through the bottom of the life he was living.  In our study of the role of stories in our life, I haven’t been thinking of one of the most potent agents of change: we see the emptiness and irrelevance of the stories we’re trying so hard to live, and–in extreme cases–we stop dead in our tracks.  Years ago I wrote down a passage from Knowledge of Freedom, Time to Change (P233): “If we are disillusioned with the roles society offers us, and are unwilling or unable to play the competitive game, we can, instead, find roles that are uniquely our own, and build within ourselves a new understanding of what it means to be a successful human being.”  That seems like a pretty good description of what happens to both Harold Crick and his narrator.–Michael