Stories About Our Lives

 

Have you ever thought about writing the story of your life? Here you are, let’s say. You are about fifty or sixty, perhaps seventy or more.  So much has happened in your life, but you know you have more in the past than you can expect in your future. Surely you think there is much more coming, there are some crowning glories you are hoping to pull off. But you are pleased with the things you have accomplished so far. There have been some hiccups, but you have overcome them. It may be useful to examine some of those as you face some future challenges you know about.

We don’t’ necessarily want the world to know the real story. We may leave hints just for the fun of it-to see if the determined, the curious, the conspiracy theorists, can follow the tortuous trail blazed through the thickets of our minds. After all, they are mysterious, jagged zig-zags of electric-nano-energies trickling between the cellular protuberances of our brain. Random variances in the minute geography of the material between our ears.

The truth is, we ourselves don’t really know where we are headed. All we know is that we are on a journey we have begun. We may have come this way before, and changed our direction to arrive at where we are now. There is nothing wrong with considering a different path. We may have come by here to repair and mend. Indeed aren’t we always mending as we go along?

 We try to do what we have done even better than the last time we tackled what lay ahead of us.

 Sometimes the ultimate path we follow proves to be a much different trail from the path we originally forged. We are the masters here –we call the shots. And we are dictators-we answer to ourselves alone. No explanations!

We know that’s not always the case.

Don’t some of us need that blank page so we can elaborate where our inspiration and imagination came from, can take us? No matter what is happening in our lives,  we need a space where we can imagine the unimaginable. Sometimes we are struck with an idea in our minds that we find electrifyingly exciting.  Do we dare let ourselves explore it? How radically would it change our lives? Do we dare even consider it? And then there are all those dangers if we don’t manage to pull it off. Have we then backed off?

Sometimes in the past we have gone for broke and pulled it off. We have come up with something in our gut that we just had to explore. It was amorphous. It may have been just indigestion, but soon enough it finds expression on the blank electronic page.  We worry at it like a dog with a bone-somehow we are dissatisfied. We tweak this, we tweak that. If it gets better, we let it rest awhile. Sometimes-rarely, we are too much in love with our own ideas-we scrap it all and start over.  Or, we go for it!

We make complexity out of simplicity. We seek the simply redolent with meaning, intimating other layers  that may escape the idle glance, demanding attention. Contemplation can distill the essences present in minute quantity, but rich, brimming with meaning. We may have come across a small knot of an idea in the mixture, a nugget of gold among all the dross. I fantasize there are such nuggets available to us in our musings which may be worth pursuing. Is that the future we will build? Is that the new part of the story of our lives that we are going to build?

Whatcha think?

The Bottom Line

Imagine, if you can, the places you would rather be,

  How life is full of striving, seeking ways to set one free.

Doing work, enjoying challenge, stretching out of sight,

  Learning stuff, fighting hard, reaching for the light.

This is what you hoped for, what living’s all about.

  Grateful and contented, tell us with a shout!

 

Lover at your side, a smile, poke  or nudge,

    From this spot why would you ever budge?

A sunny day, moments without pain,

    Millions dream these instants, unhappily, in vain

Rejoicing sweetness, tasting juicy on the tongue,

    Knowing they are fleeting, in memory’s closet hung.

 

Imagine, now, this summing up of time,

Juicy sugar plums dictated in a rhyme,

None too soon appraising what you’ve earned,

Wrested from your labors, pleasures you have spurned,

Celebrated with our singing, gathering the clan,

Joys you never planned for, delivered without plan.

 

Don’t you owe it all that the story’s told,

How events in your life did fully here unfold?

The ups and downs, the laughter and the tears,

Incredible joys and the lingering fears,

Bitter herbs and to taste the finest wine,

Here to tell the tale, that’s the bottom line.