sendings

This is not the beginning. Stars, do I wish it was. I would like this to be an attention-getting opening, followed by just the right amount of exposition. Some difficulty, some conflict, but not an egregious amount. Resolution. Denouement.

In short, I would love for my life to have a narrative structure. Blame it on all the books I insist on reading. Blame it on a fear of uncertainty. Blame it on a hunger for meaning. I want the time I think of as “wasted” to be “worth it.” (Worth what, though?)

I would like to believe this could be a beginning. Isn't it intoxicating to think everything could be different, after this? I gobble up stories, both fiction and true, about folks realizing their path. The stories that have been sticking with me lately, though, are not a hero's tale where one overlooked youth discovers that the One Thing they happen to have a knack for is going to save the world. It's the stories about people switching things up, learning skills long after school. The novelist with a master's degree in zoology. The competitive cyclist turned actor.

These stories remind me that there's no single narrative arc, that there's no one true path through the woods. I'm not on Earth to traverse the metaphorical woods, but to live in them. Maybe it's just my recent entry to middle age, but I'm slowly internalizing that everything is basically all middle.

Time is a spiral or a cycle, where pinpointing a start is nearly impossible. Any one place is as good as another. Had I started writing 5 years ago, or 10 years ago, would life be better? Maybe. Also maybe worse. Likely both, in different ways. Humans are story-tellers, have been for millennia. We make meaning. We create the structure. I think that's why I'm drawn to this medium of words. I want to create some structure to the chaos that is life.

I could make this a beginning. I could massage the memoir of my life to create Grand Meaning and make it a Fresh Start. I don't think that serves me, though. I prefer to remember that beginnings are everywhere, all the time. So commonplace as to be completely overlooked. Every point in the cycle is both new and old, fresh for this one moment, replicating the pattern of previous moments. Any moment could be The Moment, and no moment really is, except in hindsight. There's less pressure.

This isn't the beginning, and it's more possible for all that.