The story is about storytelling. Telling your story.
To write a story, one needs a set of ingredients: raw experiences, silence, time to reflect, to observe, to wonder, to research, and to choose how it begins, how it unfolds, where the twists or the humor lie, and who the characters are.
In the daily survival race, do we ever get the chance to stop and ask: Am I telling my story, or is someone else telling it for me?
I’m not talking about the radical decision to drop everything—leaving the dog with your parents, selling the car, and disappearing on an indefinite journey to Alaska. Not that it wouldn’t make for a magnificent chapter, but that’s not what I mean by “stopping.”
Taking five minutes after brushing your teeth and before heading to work to decide which part of yourself you choose to bring to the office today—that is called choosing.
Feeling that today is simply not the right day for a meeting you scheduled two weeks ago, and postponing it because a new creation is starting to “tickle” your fingertips—that is called dictating.
Admittedly, choosing to listen to yourself and acting on it may trigger a reaction from those around you. People are accustomed to the version of you that follows their script. But ultimately, when you are true to yourself, your environment begins to align with that truth. Your story writes itself through the choices you make; even when you aren’t “actively” chasing an outcome, your internal alignment allows the right action to find its way to your very doorstep.
Your story writes itself through the choices you make.
Within every one of our creations, there is a story of what was present within us at that specific moment. We immortalize an experience and, in doing so, release it. It is fascinating to look back at our creative work and examine how we have changed since its birth. Is the story I told back then still relevant? Have I neglected a story I once loved? Using this perspective is a wonderful way to check our “pulse”—to reconnect with the parts of ourselves we may have overlooked or let go, and finally give them the respect they deserve.
We were born into an endless whirl. A loop so tight you can no longer tell where it begins or ends. At some point, we must train ourselves to choose: what serves me and what doesn’t? What charges me with vitality, and what robs me of my “self”?
Lately, I’ve had these visions of grey towers melting and disappearing. It happens whenever the realization hits me that a perception which governed my world until that moment is no longer relevant. Even in a book, certain motifs stop appearing at a certain stage. They’ve served their purpose.
Saying goodbye to these outdated worldviews begins with the willingness to observe and wonder about the story that has been written in our lives so far. This moment of reflection may bring to the surface experiences that were etched negatively in previous chapters. But if they are surfacing now, it is likely because a certain “tower” in your mind is finally ready to melt. And the moment a tower melts, you are already in the process of writing a new, updated chapter of your story.