It is written

Remember these things: the food your mother cooked for a celebration. how your parents marked your twelfth birthday. the first time you called someone for Valentine's day. who you picture when you think of a successful person.

We collect these experiences like pebbles, and as we grow we piece them together to make sense of the world. It's how we put the things we saw, heard, or touched together with emotion, memory, and reaction, then attribute meaning and intention to the characters who played parts in a certain scenario. To put it simply, we tell ourselves stories about our lives.

In every story, however, there are spaces we fill in for ourselves. What was he thinking when he said that? How did my mother feel about packing lunch every morning? Why did my girlfriend turn down my proposal?

Whether we fill these gaps with kindness (she was strong and loved us), or with anger (he's a horrible person), or with self-loathing (I'm so ugly, no wonder she said no), the most important thing to remember is that these are fictions. So our life itself is, in some ways, no more than facts strung together on a fairy tale. In other hands and minds, the facts might weave a different yarn.

And in a world where so few facts are controllable, where the ground beneath our feet shakes more than we'd like, the greatest power we wield is this: we can change our stories.

When we start to think of our strung-up stories as rigid sticks, however, is when we stop seeing both possibility and improbability. Those random acts of change, redemption, fortune or miracle that make so much of joy and sorrow are also what make for edge-of-the-seat drama, nail-biting tension, walk-into-the-sunset happy endings in our lives. And when we put the yarn away and say "been there, done that, I know how this story goes," we leave no room for these surprises.

We are the writers, and we can choose to leave unwritten open spaces. Or we might say, as in the old parables, "and so it is written" -- and thus omit newness from the stories of our lives.