Encounters with Gianni Rodari

Encounters form the basis of our lives. We encounter the world at birth. It is traumatically significant, and we are at the mercy of our surroundings. We need protection, comfort, and nourishment. As we grow physically and mentally, we seek to know those forces acting on us. It is through a cognitive psychological process and physical interaction with other humans and objects that we begin to gain knowledge of the world around us and of our place in this world. The longer we live, the more we want to know, control, and enjoy our environment. Most important we want to narrate our lives instead of having our lives narrated for us. We dream of the perfect narration with a seamless thread that will bring our life histories to a happy end. But the narrative structure that we believe we can maintain is constantly challenged and broken up by encounters with people and incidents that bring other narratives which contradict, support, undermine, transform, mock, confirm, question, and celebrate our narratives or our very existence. We are constantly being encountered. Not a minute goes by when we do not have some sort of encounter with a thought, word, person, or event. Most of these encounters we learn to incorporate into the narrative we construe for ourselves, or these encounters are rationalized through the world orders whose codes are the basis of our cultural and social interactions. But there are many encounters that do not make sense, that jar us, provoke us, or ring a chord in us that we cannot completely understand. In my opinion, these mysterious and chance encounters are the ones that we must pursue because they involve risk taking. Life is banal if we simply follow the narrative that has been prescribe for us or that we have outlined for ourselves in keeping more or less with the conventions and codes of our society. It is too easy to rationalize the world according to expectations that we have come to accept. The unexpected enriches our lives and compels us to alter our narratives and expand our horizons. There is serendipity in mystery, light in darkness.