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Hero Stories

I sit at my desk, in my dark office, surrounded by faces of family members and loved ones. Pictures, tokens, and anything that reminds me of those who are not with me engulf my space. I truthfully don't know if this makes being in my office easier or harder. Certainly, I love thinking about games, laughter, and stories from other places but I also need to be awake to the emerging stories that are happening here which doesn't happen when you are living in the past. 

I don't know why I am also being resistant to some of the work I need to do. I enjoy my research, I tell myself often. I like my participants and thinking about their lives. I like writing and finding beautiful words to describe the indescribable. And yet, I am unable to, in that moment, do the work that I love. Somehow it does emerge and words and pages are formed but I do not yet know how it happens when I so clearly refuse to work. 

Despite this feeling, I show up at my office everyday. I sit at my desk, as I do now. I write words no matter what they are about, as I do now. And I try to make a plan for what will come next. What is the next thing I want to cross off my list? What will make me proud, happy, productive? All of these questions seem to be linked, in part, to a larger question. What is it that I want? In this moment? In ten years? When I must look back on this day, as we all must do at some point before our lives end, what will I want to see? And what will I see? 

I have said so many times in my life, "What is the story you want told of you? What is the story you want to tell?" Like all good stories, there will be the ups and the downs. There will be the moments when the reader cannot believe what the protagonist is doing. But, there is always that moment, when things are at their worst, when the story can plunge deeper into darkness or rise from the ashes to greater heights, when the hero of the story realizes who they really are and rises up to meet the challenge. I am not yet there but when the time comes, I hope that I will be that hero for my own story.

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