YOURS, MINE, and OURS
Thursday, March 16, 2024
I cannot fix the past, but I can write my future.
This is not my story, or yours, or anyone’s. It’s everyone’s …
I cannot control anyone else’s future, nor should I ever try, but whatever amends I try, to fix anything I’ve made wrong somehow in my life until now, it is a crazy-makin' fool’s errand – because what is ahead of us is all that matters now.
Do I pick the next step, choose the next call, and vote YES or NO every day?
I could sit by the phone like a teenage girl on Friday night, hoping the phone would ring, keep my schedule clear, and wait for others to make their move.
But, no.
I consciously, deliberately, vote with my feet – to stay where I am or to adventure where I dream and where I am determined to go in every relationship, with every client, colleague, competitor, family member and those yet unmet strangers. That story has an undetermined path, like a trigonometry equation with one too many variables. That story has one writer, me.
It might be true, it might be fiction – but like most stories, it will be a hybrid blend of truths we’ve been told, things we’ve heard described as truths from experiences of others (but cannot honestly know), lies we’ve been told, secrets we’ve kept and lies we’ve told ourselves.
Living in the deep and often murky waters of reality and conflicts is neither safe nor easy. But always sweeter than a life lived on the surface of quickly skating across like long-legged water insects which walk on water as delicately as angels dance on the head of a pin.
I chart my course and navigate the steps that follow, and the twists and turns with my moral compass to guide me, engaging others to collaborate in ways I was never taught or imagined.
I am the author of my life, not simply an unnamed character or supporting actor/antagonist. This is my life – it is an original nobody else can paint, nor would they likely want to try …
When we read a gripping book or find ourselves tense with anticipation while watching the opening scenes of an intentional story, a movie plot that knows where it’s going. Still, we don’t have x-ray vision to see behind the scenes into the psyche of characters or see their motives transparently.
But the reveal is in the hands of the storyteller, and we are the self-enabling audience mid-manipulation. The writer wanted it that way, and the director, too, because they get to choose where to start so close to the end – to tease us with a gripping scene near the end without revealing how the story ends, yet we catch a glimpse of which characters are still standing near the end of the story.
That is not like life either; not chronological, sequential, or orderly. Then we have gotten an out-of-context taste tease; we then shift back to the commencement of the story as the storyteller wants us to follow the story the way they intend it to be told.
That is art that is controlled, and that is manipulation. We love it. Whether a romantic story, wild fantasy, or a documentary, we love to submit to the storyteller, allow ourselves to be drawn into that story as if we are there – as if we are the characters the storyteller wants us to identify with, which is part storytelling, and another part good casting.
Shift now to your life and the characters in it.
People, you know, you know what I mean – snap a picture in your mind of the joy or the strife of today, get all the players/characters/family members and the tension at play, roll that around in your mind a bit and ask, what is the story I am telling myself? Where am I? What is this tension about today’s tension, someone’s difficulties, everyone’s sense of unease …
Now, stop.
Go back.
Where does this story begin?
Who started it?
Where on the stage did this story begin, who was there, who was the hero, the villain, the random bit players, the extras and superfluous characters, and when in time was that story set?
Something happened; what was it?
Somebody said, “OK, and …action!”
The curtain rises, and our story begins.
Act 1, Scene 1.
As I see it, the confluence of everything up until now, is the narrative of my life – perhaps yours too, the story we tell ourselves, and we happily tell parts of that story to others. But is that story true to anyone's life or a creation of a writer's experience or imagination? Is that how any of those role-playing characters see our story from our perspective?
Of course not.
I have learned more about myself and what makes me tick at this stage of life than I could have imagined, which makes me wonder – if I could have seen my ‘right now’ as the opening scene of a thriller movie before going about the start of it all, what advice I’d have given my younger self to foretell the arc of the story about to unfold.
Can we do any of that? Sure, in our minds, but for what purpose?
My sense today is that our entire non-fiction human story began in circumstances we never chose. Because our grandparents met and travelled their path, they had children who, in turn, met. An amalgamation of lives, stories and places in their history was wrapped inside everyone's history and the mystery we have spent our lives unravelling. We are they, and they are us, our novel, one we are still writing.
Love and life and family, friends and foes and colleagues, are all the extra players in a magnificent play we are writing while living, measuring and recalibrating. Life is no rehearsal; this is better than opening night, playing to a sold-out house, this is another day in our acutely personal morality play, our journey to paradise.
Are we there yet?
There is no preview; we cannot tune in tomorrow to see what happens in the next episode.
The difference between our fictional life, the one we imagine ourselves leading, is in our hands to craft, or we can leave the story stewing in our head, wondering how we got here, how we managed to navigate our cast of characters as they shaped our journey by their actions or failures to act. Still, now the next step in the story is about to unfold.
There is no time to waste, time to stop consulting with others and procrastinating, time to say to everyone in our lives – love you all; it’s been a great roller coaster ride up until now, but choices had to be made about which next step to take – that’s our individual choice.
You make yours. I make mine.
It’s not the ‘ready-fire-aim’ experiments of youthful indiscretion and ill-conceived past hopes and dreams.
This is my story, not yours.
Your story is yours, not mine.