My life is a narrative. I have always seen it this way.
Characters fade in and out as they travel through the chapters of my life, and
vibrant and varying settings adorn circumstances which twist and turn in ways
as unexpected as the most cunning novel. In fact, in many ways I feel as if the
true human narrative is far superior to the stories that human hands write down
because they have no bounds. My life is not limited to genre. In just one day,
I may wake up to find myself in a chapter filled with astonishing fantasy and
adventure, yet find myself, by evening, within a love story.
Recently I realized, to my astonishment, that not everyone’s
life is a story. Some, like my loving man, see life as a poem. Others, like the
Apostle Paul, see life as a race to the finish line. Since this realization, I’ve
spent time pondering the results of a mind following life through the pages of
an unseen book. It is truly amazing how a simple perspective can change the way
you respond to the world and to circumstances. Out of the context of my
narrative perspective, it may, for example, seem strange that on the day in
which I accidentally propelled myself foot first down a flight of stairs,
shattering my foot into pieces, I managed to have one of the best days I had
had in a month. From the perspective of a poetry life, the words “broken foot”
are perhaps entirely antipoetic. And, of course, from the perspective of a
marathon life, a broken foot is a serious setback, and not at all pleasant to
run on. But from the perspective of a narrative life, a little adventure and a
pinch of misfortune are what make it worth turning to the next page.
In this way, I have managed to bear my few misfortunes in
life with tolerable cheerfulness. Yet despair is different. I never could
tolerate a depressing and hopeless story. If a book even hints at having a
hopelessly depressing ending, I will make it a thrift shop donation so fast it
won’t know what hit it. When despair clouded the narrative of my life and
settled down with an attitude of permanence, I stopped writing. A story which
is over-steeped in the haze of despair cannot be worth describing.
This, of course, is where I am wrong. I suppose there is a
reason why all of those hideous American short stories that I was forced to
read in college became classics, and I also suppose that one cannot choose the
genre that each stage of life takes on. I have been given a story, and I have
only to write it down.
