The other day a thought occurred to me. What if you were to imagine your life story as a novel that had already been written? A stranger wanders over to a table in a cafe and picks up your book. They leaf through the pages idly, stopping randomly at a certain point. That point is now. At this one point in the story, they know nothing of your past and nothing of your future. All that they will know of your story is from the letters that they read, those words, lines and paragraphs that describe all that is happening right now. The stranger in the cafe begins to read. What will they find? Who is the main character of your story? What type of story will they believe that they are reading - action, thriller, horror, adventure, romance, or tragedy?
This is exactly what is happening now, when you look at your own situation. You are reading the chapter that concerns all that is occurring in the present moment. Unlike the mysterious reader in the cafe, you already know the past, you understand perfectly all of those things, those actions, the decisions, those strange quirks and twists of fate, that brought you to where you are now and that made you into the person that you have become. Only, just like our reader, you also do not know how the story is going to unfold, you can not know what the future holds in store for you. If you could, would you even want to flick to the end, to read those last few lines, to discover how your story ends?
Life is like this. You are here and it is now. Ahead of you lies many more sentences that you must write. How your story will unfold is not yet defined. You hold the pen poised above the paper. The shapes that it makes are your own to make, those shapes create the letters that form the story. There will be influences and occurrences that are out of your control, but all of these will be necessary to help you, to move the story forward. Like now, as I write, thoughts come unbidden to my mind, that influence the direction of my writing. So too will it be with your life, with the events that are yet to come. You will subtly, subconsciously alter the fabric of the story, bend it to your will, to try to make it flow the way that you wish. I know this to be true because it is exactly what I have done. I created my own situation through subconscious thought, through positioning myself so that I was more able to take the opportunities that came my way. I was not aware of it until after, but when I looked back, it was obvious that that is what I had been doing. I could not alter the events ahead of me, but I could ensure that I was in the best possible situation to take advantage of what came my way. And in so doing, to reach out for my dreams. Those events would have come to me, come at me, and perhaps I would not have been able to react in the same way. I see this as the definition of fortune. Fortune is the ability to see and to grasp opportunity. No one, and I mean this truly, no one is born unlucky, no one sits with a dark cloud above their head. That cloud is of your own making, the way that you view life. And if you were the creator, so too can you be the destroyer. You hold the key and you hold the power over it. The choice is yours and yours alone.
I thought the other day about a very dark chapter in my own life, a time when I was utterly lost, when I could not see any way out of the black that had consumed me. I was in despair. Everything that I had cherished and loved was taken from me. I didn't see it coming and it left me in a state of shock. In this moment of my life, I thought I was cursed, I believed more than ever that nothing ever worked out for me, that I was unlucky, that there was little point in continuing. Every night I went to bed, I did not want to wake up because I knew that when I did, the reality of my situation would dawn on my all over again, and it would take me down further. Had I been in a cafe and picked up my own life story and begun reading at this point, I would have wondered how such a thing could have happened, why someone with a good heart, who always tried so hard for others, could have befallen such a disaster. And probably, because I'm a sucker for an underdog story, I would want the foolish boy who believed so much in the promise of love, to succeed, to find his way out and to have a happy ending. I needed that dark chapter of my life, as much as I need the light. That particular chapter was necessary to bring me to here and to now. All of these years later, my life has turned into a voyage of discovery and adventure. I'm still looking for that happiness that can only be found in love, but as surely as eggs are eggs, I don't want my ending to come just yet. I still have so much to do, so much more to write and so many stories to tell my children.
And so do you. There are pages upon pages of blank whiteness ahead of you. What is behind is gone. It is done. Now, here you stand. At your feet lie a shield and a sword, all around you are the sounds and sights of the raging battle that is life. It is your decision on whether you fight for the life that you want, whether you raise your shield to ward off the blows that will surely come, whether your swing your sword to strike down your enemies that will try to stop you. Write you own story. Don't get caught up in the past, don't think about now. Instead, look to your future, decide what it is that you want, picture where you wish to go, and then fight for it. Each strike of the enemy parried by your shield forms a letter, each swing of the sword creates the sentence. Your story, your book, your ending. You are not defined by who you are now, you are defined by who you will become and the writing of that story is in your own hands. So, go write it.
_________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment