The preamble to many a tale. The opener to embarking on an adventure. The words we all know very well.
Page after page, chapter after chapter, volume after volume; we write our ‘once upon a time’s. Settings, characters, plots, sub-plots, twists, cliffhangers, to-be-continueds; they’re all there. The narratives, created every day, poetically by every breath we take.
What are the stories we tell? The stories of our tales and adventures? The ones we identify with. The ones we attach to. The stories we remember when we think of who we are; who we’ve become. What are those stories?
We are all an audience to these stories. We are an audience to our own stories. Often, they are narratives of victimhood. We tell the stories of our brokenness. We replay these stories continuously, on a loop in our minds. We create an identity by them. We relate with them and we perpetuate them.
That loop is not our full story. It’s not all of who we are, yet it’s often the part we go back to. We revisit those parts over and over until the pages get blurred as to if we wrote the story or if the story is now writing us. We find familiarity there, in that remembered character. And, even when we move onto to the next chapter, we keep to our character; the one that has been hurt. We get good at feeling not good. We, almost, ensure that amidst the differing backdrops, casts and plots, we find a way to play the same character. The character we’ve convinced ourselves to be.
Where are our stories of Love?
Every page authors who we are, and to tear out the ones we wished weren’t there, would leave our book incomplete. Our hands would feel the spaces in between the pages; removing them would be to remove a part of us. But, not only do we leave those pages intact, we bookmark them, we underscore them, we return to them time and time again to remind us of what was. Yet, in our Heart, we want to write something different of what is. Of what will be.
Tell the stories of Love. Remember them. Relive them. Become them. That is what I write into my Heart. That is the character I cast for myself. The one that has experienced Love far bigger and more powerful than anything under the moon and stars. The one that has felt meaning, purpose, beauty, selflessness, vulnerability, accountability and strength beyond measure. The hugs, the smiles, the commitment and the connection. That is the story I tell of myself and my life. Not of what was, but of what is and of what is to come back to me; Love. That is my true story. I won’t ignore the pages from the in between, but I won’t retell them. I won’t rewrite them.
We are meant to write our story so as to live that story. Each page is you. I am choosing to re-read the good pages. I am choosing to write the good pages. The ones that make my Heart feel bigger than the Universe and deserving of all the Love it can hold. I’ve felt what it is and I know that is the real story. That’s what I go back to, not the parts in between. I am grateful for all of the pages because of their part in my story but my story is more. My story is one that is bigger, it is one of Love.
Be Love.
