Your story is awesome, overwhelming and beyond imagination. Your life is a book, but it’s probably not a best seller. It’s a rough manuscript stained with coffee rings and nicotine. It’s not the crisp, clean, perfectly penned pages found in a bookstore. Instead it is aged, torn, and sloppily written.
A best seller is a natural page turner, exciting in all the right ways and follows a fantastic formula. Our daily lives are unremarkable, our scenes make little sense, and the narrative is shit. Nothing seems to happen for any reason, the rise of action rarely leads to anything great. It’s like an underdog story without overcoming the odds, or a redemption story without redemption.
When we read back over our life book it seems like none of the characters make any sense, the bad guys always win, and the plot seems completely absent.
Throughout our lives we grab at our hair and pull it out screaming “Why is this happening to me? When will any of it ever stop?”
It is easy to get caught up in our lives. Often, we mistake ourselves as the main character of the story, so why wouldn’t we? If we aren’t the main character, who is?
Chill, drink a cup of coffee and burn your candle at both ends. Miss a night’s rest and immerse yourself in this crap life of yours. Take some time and figure out what the hell is happening and try doing something about it. If you need to complain or cry or beat yourself up, do it. Wallow in your misery, let it infect every spirit fiber of your being.
Take some time and get to know your pain, make it your friend. While you’re at it think about your mortality and look back on your life. How remarkable has it been? How much good have you done for others? What is your legacy?
At the end of your life will your story have been written with the blood and tears of others? Will it be a terrible tale of envy and anger? Will its pages be aged, wrinkled, and bound into a bloated book?
Or will you have lived a good life, a loving Life? An existence committed to the enrichment of others. A life with purpose. A purpose that was right for you, one of empathy, creativity, and humility. A story you wrote, a narrative you drove forward with your blood, sweat and tears?
Did you learn along the way that you are not the main character? That others have feelings, make mistakes and are bumbling through this complicated existence just like you?
Take a breath. Take a big ol breath. If you are reading this, you aren’t dead. You are alive. Even if you are laying on your death bed waiting for the ticks of time to slip away there is hope. With hope there is goodness, you have time to do good, be good and help others feel good. You have time to leave your anger at the door, to invite love into your life and embrace the fate you make.
The pain you feel might pass; it may never pass. It might ride you like a jockey till the end of the race. But that’s alright, I believe you will find a way. You will climb the tallest mind mountain and experience an epiphany that will forever transform your life.
A life that is awesome, overwhelming and beyond imagination. One without crisp, clean, and perfectly penned pages. It will be a rough manuscript stained with coffee rings and nicotine, it will be aged, torn, and sloppily written. It will be the best tale, the greatest story, it will be the book of your life.
