Your Life, Your Story

There are days in our lives when it feels as if nothing is ever going to work out.  Sometimes, those days stretch into weeks or even months and the feeling becomes inescapable.  It seems as though there is no way out of the darkness that threatens to consume you, to overwhelm you, and to take you down to the bottom of the abyss from which there is no return.  When these times come upon us, and they surely will, just as the sun rises and sets each day, it is easy to despair, to blame ill-luck and bad fortune for all that has befallen you.  How is it then, that you can deal with the bleakness of these situations, how can you keep your head above the waters that threaten to engulf you?

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.

_________________________

The Legacy That We Leave Behind

Today, I sat and listened to some Counting Crows songs on You Tube.  One of my favourites has always been Have You Seen Me Lately? particularly the acoustic version.  Listening to this song set me to thinking about what would happen if I were no longer around, if I were to disappear, what would be the legacy that I would leave behind?

Please don't get me wrong, I am not planning on disappearing any time soon.  Sorry folks, I hope to be around for a long time yet.  My melancholy thoughts today are surely driven by it being the birthday of a dear friend of mine, who was unfortunately taken from us.  I remember him clearly, I can still hear his laugh, I can still visualise his antics.  I know that his spirit lives on, all the time that I hold on to those memories.  So, as I sat listening to this song, I began to wonder what is it that I will leave behind.

For many people, that legacy is their family.  The sons and daughters that carry the blood of the parents, that continue the family line.  In the Old Testament, it was the children of Jacob that continued the line of Israel, and for generations since, that blood line has continued.  I am the son of my father, who is the son of his father before him, and so on.  The male line of my fathers will end with me, since I have no family of my own, as least not yet.  It is therefore not possible for me to leave behind any blood to continue my line. 

My writing then, could that be my legacy?  I wonder if there will be anyone, in years to come, who chances upon something that I have written, all of these words that I have formed into a sentence or phrase, and I wonder if they will be affected by those words?  I do know from some feedback I have received, that my words do have some affect on peoples lives.  What I write makes people think, it inspires, it raises questions, it causes people to smile, it makes them sad, it provokes an emotional response, and it has the power to help.  The words I write here in this blog, as well as the books of poems and inspirational writing that I have written, exist in the vastness of the internet, stored on a computer some where in the world, in the form of 1s and 0s.  If those servers were to crash, if Google were to seize to exist, if Amazon went out of business, if I am no longer here to update those books into changing data standards and maintain my blog account, then those books and my blog will seize to exist.

I have written travel journals of my times in Asia, South Africa, of trips to USA, Fiji, Australia.  I have a number of dive log books, that detail the first 500 dives that I made.  These will also live on after I am gone.  But where?  With no children to care for them, surely they will be discarded as having no value other than sentimental value?   Who would wish to keep them, as they are personal and would be irrelevant for any one outside of my family.

The friends I have, I would last in the memories of my friends.  I have few true friends if truth be told.  Yes, my memory would burn within them for a time, but gradually, those memories would fade away and be gone.  When those friends passed, then so too would my legacy, with no one to recall the memories of me and the times that we shared together.

My parents, my brother and my sister, they would surely remember me?  I've lived overseas for 11 years, and in that time, I have not spent a great deal of time with them. I speak to my parents fairly regularly, as time differences and the internet availability allows, but it is not easy.  As much as I wish it were different, I rarely speak to my brother and sister at all these days.  I hear from them only if I contact them, or if they need something from me.  Their lives are too busy, too full for a brother that has been away as much as I.  I no longer figure in their lives.  I am not present.  I am already the shadow of a person that they once knew.

It seems to me that I could quietly go away and perhaps no one would notice that I was gone.  I could creep out and quietly close the door behind me.  Just like Christopher McCandless in the book and movie, Into The Wild, I could disappear from my life and leave it all behind.  In a very short while, no one would know that I had ever been there.  Perhaps I have been fading out for all of these years.  Maybe that is what I have been subconsciously doing?  Bringing my life to such a point where, if I were to depart, no one would notice my absence.  Perhaps I have done this so that I did not disturb any one on the way out.  That would be very much like me.

As I wrote above, I am not going anywhere just yet.  I have no intentions of leaving, since my work here is still not done, not until I have my own family, not until I see the laughter and joy in the faces of my children.  That is my purpose here and I will see it done.  I'll end this post with the poem that I was inspired to write, entitled, Would You Remember Me?


Would You Remember Me?

Sometimes I wonder,

Whether I am in danger of disappearing,
Like the last leaf of a summer gone by,
Torn from the bough,
Falling to the ground in the chill wind of autumn,
Would anyone miss me?
Would anyone care?
If I was nothing more than words,
Once written by a heart,
If I was nothing other than a memory,
A figure who once walked his path,
Who spoke of love and light,
And now, alas, just a shadow,
A glimpse, a fleeting thought,
Would you remember me?

_________________________