INCITING MOMENTS

We can all look back on our lives  and pinpoint a moment in time when everything changed.
A specific moment when the world flipped upside down and became forever different.
A precise moment when we were personally  transformed and life from that point presented a new path.

For Helen Keller, that life-changing  moment was when she connected the sign Anne Sullivan made in her palm with the substance simultaneously  flowing over her hand.

For Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, and for all those who live in South Africa, life forever changed in 1994 when the first multi-racial, democratic elections were held.

For African slaves in Texas, Juneteenth (June 19, 1865) became the liberating moment in history.

For our nation, September 11, 2001 changed the lives of those who died, those who rescued many, and those who still mourn.

Are we now as a nation standing on the precipice of an inciting moment as we wrestle with our role and actions in Syria?

For Langston Hughes, one important moment occurred as he rode the train and realized the role of rivers in the lives of Africans and African Americans.  This lead to his now famous poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers  This story is told in Langston's Train Ride.

For the child in the front row of your classroom or seated at the table in your own home, earth may have stopped spinning on the day Dad left home and never returned.

The moment that changed your life may have been the birth of a sibling, the day you fell in love with the person created just for you, the first day school, or the day your family moved to a new city.

Or the moment may have been the day the doctor announced you had cancer or that your child was seriously ill.  It may have been the moment  the company eliminated your job.

There probably have been many inciting moments in your life.

I  remember the day my youngest step-son unlocked the secret to reading. He was five and had just started Kindergarten. I was doing the dinner dishes.  He sat nearby with an early reader in his lap.

There is the word the.   We learned that in school.   Oh look, I know here too.  

He continued to look at the page.

D- this word starts with /d/.
Oh- Oh-Oh!!
This is dog--there is picture of a dog!
Does this say Here is the dog. ?

Barely able to contain his excitement, he read the remainder of the book by himself ...over and over and over.
And we all listened...over and over.
This was 25 years ago
I often wish we had quick access to a cell phone with video capacity  so I could have captured that important moment.

In Writing a Life: Teaching Memoir to Sharpen Insight, Shape Meaning - and Triumph Over Tests, Katherine Bomer calls these inciting moments:

It is powerful to name one certain day, one certain event as the inciting moment, when the exact confluence of persons, times, and events combined and combusted into a moment that changed everything.  The moment may be literally that--a space of time from seconds to minutes to an hour. But is may also be one notch on a long timeline of events. The time it occupied might a week or even months, but from the long view looking back, it appears to be a moment in time.

And she challenges us to identify and write about those moments, asking ourselves:

• What are the moments in your life that you remember as important, as happy or sad? (question asked by Robert Coles of a patient in The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination)
• Can you point to a time in your life that your worldview shifted?
• Can you point to a time in your life when you figured something out that you didn't know before?  or recognized a feeling  of some truth being revealed?
• Can you point to a time in your life when you thought a certain way and then something or someone changed your thinking? (See related post  I Used to Think..But Now I Think)

We used  Bomer's book as our guiding text throughout one of the several years I lead a teacher writing group at Salem Elementary School. Defining our inciting moments proved to be one our best writing endeavors and led to deeper understanding of ourselves and each other.

We can help writers learn  identify and analyze these moments in their lives.  We can support them as they name the consequences and ramifications of their inciting moments.

Several books present characters, real and fictional, who face such moments.

In Love That Dog by Sharon Creech, the narrator discovers that poetry can give him a platform to name and share his inciting moment- the death of his beloved dog.

So much depends upon...

In Mississippi Morning  by Ruth Vander Zee, a small boy's life is changed forever the day he realized, after hearing about the hateful things the Ku Klux Klan had done in his area,  that the Klansman walking toward him is his father.

Ma..she seemed to worry about trouble and I don't know why. It was 1933 and life was good for me.

In Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, a teen lives with the aftermath-- and her own silence following a rape.

I almost tell them right then and there. Tears flood my eyes...They noticed...

In Through My Eyes, a grown-up Ruby Bridges looks back on her inciting moment-- looks back on her six-year old self as she, surrounded by US Marshals, walked bravely through a mob of hate and evil to enter her school.

It was 1960, and history pushed in  and swept me up in a whirlwind... In spite of the aftereffects of the whirlwind, I feel privileged now to have been a part of the civil rights struggle.

 For Anne Quinlan it was reading and books that created inciting moments for her.  She describes these moments and suggests several lists of books that may incite special moments for you, as well, in How Reading Changed My Life.

It seems infinitely mysterious to me that there are some of us who have built not a life but a self, based largely  on our hunger for what are a series of scratches on a piece of paper.

Likewise, Phil Schwalbe and his mother face her impending death though the pages of the many books they shared, mediating this inciting moment with the words of others. He tells their story in The End of Your Life Book Club (Vintage).

What are you reading?....one November day while passing the time between when they took Mother's blood and when she saw the doctor (which preceded the chemo), I threw out the question..

What moment changed your life forever?
What are your inciting moments?

Today's Deeper Writing Possibilities

Reflect on your like and identify one or more inciting moments.

You may want to ask yourself these questions as you look for moments in which your life changed:

• What are the moments in your life that you remember as important, as happy or sad? (question raised by Robert Coles to a patient in The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination)
• Can you point to a time in your life that you worldview shifted?
• Can you point to a time in your life when you figured something out that you didn't know before?  or recognized a feeling of some truth being revealed?
• Can you point to a time in your life when you thought a certain way and then something or someone changed your thinking?

When I  have used this writing possibility in the past,  writers found Marzano's Episodic Pattern Organizer  helpful as they analyzed their inciting moment. Click here to see this graphic organizer.  It is one of the several that I used regularly as we analyzed events in social studies or current events.

You may want to use one of the following phrases to spark your thinking and writing:

So much depended on...
I never thought...
In that time...
Then... now..
Because of.... I

Write about your inciting moment--a specific time, event, or moment that changed everything for you/your life/the world.

Write a poem or narrative or essay.  You may want to pair your writing with visual images.