Back Into Life

Remember that the story isn’t over. You may be a storyteller, and you will end the stories you tell as a matter of necessity, but the story isn’t over. How we despair when we believe the story is actually over. We jolt awake at midnight to a world condemned to darkness. We have finally crossed some divide where nothing that has left will return, no field gone fallow will ever flower again, and life is but one endless season of loss. We have always suspected it was possible, we have worried that it was possible, and now through carelessness or cruelty or the indifferent hand of fate the curtain has finally dropped.

My very liberal friends believed the story was over when George W. Bush was President. Torture and war and spying and who knew what else. But the story wasn’t over. Then my conservative friends thought the story was over when Barak Obama was elected, for we were all socialists now. But the story wasn’t over. Because then Tea Partiers were elected to Congress and my liberal friends again thought the story was over. But the story is still being told.

The stories we tell one another must have an ending. Though the story of our life is still being told and cannot stop being told, it would be dishonest to let the stories we tell go on without conclusion. What we call The End is merely the moment at which we remind our reader of what they have perhaps forgotten or taken for granted. In fact, if it is the best kind of story it is anything but an end. Rather, it is a beginning, an invitation back into the story of life.

Write Within Yourself: An Author's Companion. "A book to keep nearby whenever your writer's spirit needs feeding." Deb Caletti.

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