What Chapter Are You On?

I’m beginning to understand that we live our lives in chapters, short and long, each chapter a different story. I want my life to be a great read. In early chapters, we’re growing up, learning our likes and dislikes, and discovering who we are.

In later chapters, we’re getting educated, through school, through life experience, and through work. We get focused on relationships, having children, and building our careers in other chapters. Many of those things can occur at the same time, but at various times in our lives the focus is usually on one or two.

The cast of characters are constantly changing as the chapters change, people flow in and people flow out of our lives. For some, the characters stay the same, a very specific stability is important in many cases.

At times, the chapters can be quite boring, where we’re just coasting along, living each day as it comes, stuck in our routines, sometimes very happily so. Then a change comes to jostle you a bit, or knock you completely off your feet: deaths, job changes, broken relationships, health issues, moves from one place to another.  They can feel like little deaths in a sense, or maybe even actually so.

“All change, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves, we must die to one life before we can enter another." Anatole France.

I like change, or so I tell myself. I’m naturally optimistic, so when I experience an ending, even if it’s just finishing the ketchup, I feel like something new and exciting has an opportunity to come, spicy ketchup maybe:-)

We get thrown for a loop periodically. There’s an earthquake under our feet but not under anybody else’s. Your tectonic plates are shifting but when you look across the street, everything seems to be just as it was, for everybody else at least. What happened? You may be even screaming in your head. WHAT HAPPENED? No answers come, not yet anyway, not quickly enough. Maybe never.

I am constantly amazed at how life continues, the wheels keep turning even when I feel like my life has stopped. Everybody else seems to be moving along just fine, or so it seems. The earth continues to spin on its axis. People go to work, go to class, go on vacation, the day in and day out. There's a sameness in it. Sometimes it's comforting and sometimes it feels smothering.

The pandemic was a surprise chapter for all of us. Who wrote that?! It gave us all an opportunity to look at our lives and possibly let go of the things that no longer fit with who we are, or who we would like to be. We had an opportunity to more deliberately write new chapters.

We are the authors of our lives. We write our own stories. We create our lives. We can do it deliberately or ride the boat down the river to wherever it takes us. I personally want to have a say in where my life is going and what experiences I have.

Everybody’s journey is different. Vive la difference!  Some travel fast through life. Now is the only option! Others take a much slower pace, tortoise and hare, hare and tortoise.  There’s a middle road for a lot of people too. Life ebbs and flows. 

Your timing is your timing.  Everyone has to travel at their own pace. How about you? What’s your speed? What chapter are you on? We are the authors of our lives, so let’s get pen to paper and write the next chapter. What chapter will you write today?

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