This short piece started out as a reply to Kirsty Stanley’s blog on Narrative Inquiry.
English: Screenshot from Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The river tells a story and the Kawa approach is very much about narrative and lived experience. It is only through narrative that we can attain a true understanding of the experience of others. We are nothing but stories – our history, our identity, our learning, our government, culture, beliefs, upbringing, environments are all stories. Our interactions with one another generate further stories which ebb and flow around the landscape of our perceptions.
“Science without art is a tea bag without water” is very true. And the reverse is also true, after all, in a creative role I use technologies and applications which have come from scientific endeavour. Science gives us the resources to explore our creativity to greater and greater levels. What art gives science is the opportunity to integrate itself more fully with humanity.
I think one of the biggest problems we face is the way that both science and art are represented by the media. Science is often seen as some kind of eggheaded netherworld where the man in the street is not welcome; and art can be portrayed as either wacky and off the wall or or entirely elite and inaccessible. What is worse, our conflict obsessed media, will always pitch one against the other, and when these two disciplines do converge it is seen as ground-breaking – even though the likes of Da Vinci, Aristotle had been combining both the scientific and creative arts in their thinking long before our profession was even conceived of.
Occupational Therapists are (or should be in my eyes) curators and analysts of the stories which we are presented with. We make sense of the narratives we encounter through the application of the processes we are trained in and the experience we accumulate. More than this, we need to be pattern recognisers and meta-theorists who see the connections between multiple systems and can understand the cultural relevance in a situation no matter what the lived experience of the individual or group.
If you are in any doubt regarding the importance of narrative, then think about a time when you have been asked to tell your story – how did it feel? How often do we get the opportunity to tell our story, or even a part of it? Taking a narrative approach demands that we listen, which promotes concentration and compassion, from this emerges understanding and relevance. Only through truly engaging with the lived experience of the client can we fully apply our professional skills, values and core beliefs.
What are we but stories?
Related articles
Kawa Creative - Reflections 
Great response, I agree with you wholeheartedly – we need both and I like how you describe how they transform each other.