Saturday, July 6, 2013

"We will all be stories someday"

I spend a lot of my time in stories. Thinking about created stories, dreaming up stories of my own, writing continuations or filling in gaps of stories I love. Tales take up much of my time.

Humans live and breathe stories because we love them. We want a good story. When we meet people we haven't seen for a while, we tell them stories. For example, my family would tell the same stories four or five times the past few weeks because we were catching up with relatives, and we'd listen to their stories as well. It's simply how we communicate. Sometimes we tell our own stories, sometimes we tell another person's stories, and sometimes we embellish a little bit to make the story sound better.

Stories also follow a similar pattern each time because of other reasons as well, reasons that go beyond this physical world and into our very makeup--and the ones who did the making. Ever notice that? When stories don't have an ending it enrages people because we crave closure. When there isn't one big final battle, one scene where good triumphs over evil, we start flipping tables because that's not what was supposed to happen! We don't want that to be how it all ends for us.

(Read Epic; it explains all of this in more detail.)

And what we forget is that we are living in our own stories composed of smaller scenes that are in themselves stories that all come together in a big smooshy story casserole to form the story we know as History. And even History isn't the biggest story of them all!

And we serve as minor characters in other people's lives, as they serve in ours. They may only be there for a moment, but still they exist, and have their own massively complicated story that we may never know in its entirety.

(You should hear how fast I'm typing! I get so excited talking about this!!)

Maybe I'm thinking about this because of my upcoming Worldview class on Epic. Or maybe it's because I'm seeing all the stories that created my family. Maybe I'm thinking about this because I'm wondering if I'll remember these parts of my story very clearly later on. Or maybe I'm just excited for the stories I'm staring to create on my own and hoping they'll turn out the way they are meant to be. I don't really know.

Stories!!

That quote up there, the title? That's a quote from the movie version of The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I cried. Oh, how I cried. Because Charlie's story was so very sad, and it could have ended horribly. But it didn't. And he looks at the happy old photographs and the people on the street and his best friends and himself and he knows that they are all living stories. And they cannot determine everything in how the story goes, but they can decide whether or not to take the situation handed them and work with it or let it end badly. And he chose to learn from his experiences, good and bad, and grab onto those moments where everything is understandable. Those infinite moments where there is no past or future to weigh anything down are what he will live for. Those moments where he can do anything.

Ahem.

Sorry about that. You know me, I'll go off sometimes on a long ramble...I'm a ramblebug. My wings are powered by thoughts. Bzzzzz.

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