OUR LIVES ARE AN OPEN BOOK

                                   

 I have an analogy that always comes to my meandering mind whenever I think about our on going human lives and it involves our day-to-day living and me writing a book. A natural comparison you say for an Author. For you see I imagine our lives, like the pages and chapters of a book to be a story that is always a works in progress. Hopefully, someday, someplace, we will be allowed to write a proper ending to it. Right now though, we’re just along for the ride and going where the story takes us. Hopefully, if all ends well, we will have rode happily off into the sunset, like the main character in the book, satisfied, our story is over and our ending complete. As an author I can tell you when writing a novel I don’t always go where I intended to go with a story and in the end I have to go where the story takes me. That’s what we need to do in life too. We have dreams and aspirations about where our lives should go, but things change and situations come up and we have to improvise and come at it from another angle. Sometimes making good things out of bad, sometimes simply failing once more.

It’s this flexibility, this versatility, which allows for us to go forward in life when we’ve been knocked down. Getting knocked down isn’t the problem. It’s not getting back up again that is. To get back up and take those necessary corrective steps, sometimes backwards, only to go forward again, reenergized and somewhat resolved that this too could work. I have had to do this in my life lately because everything was thrown topsy-turvy for a while and I was pulled down into the depths of despair. It’s like being thrown overboard from a speeding boat when you weren’t paying attention and as you brake the surface of the water, coming back up from the depths, you are disoriented for a while, but instead of just flailing off in any direction you treaded water for a while, looked around and pondered your options. You know that time and energy are not finite and you need to get it right this time. That second chances come along all of the time but unlike first chances, this time it has to be right because the odds of another chance are greatly diminished and your life could be seriously damaged.

Life, as I see it in my analogy, like the making of a book, takes a lot of editing to get it right sometimes. We have to be willing to recognize and let go of things that don’t work for the story. Life isn’t meant to be hard and fast and so inflexible. There is a lot of room to be creative and make it the best you can, before it goes to print. We have to do that because it is at this point, that it becomes much harder to change. The best mistakes we can make are the ones we caught and corrected and no one ever knew about them. We learned the lesson without the punishment.

I just finished my tenth book and now I need to think about what’s next. That’s the way life is too. We finish up one story and wonder what’s next. Then along comes another story we never knew existed. Isn’t it great?