Here I Am....Turn the Page

Life is very much like a book. Opening the front cover of that book represents birth. The following pages are the adventures and nuances of a life yet to be lived. Turning the last page, and closing the book’s back cover are a metaphor for the end of life. This is powerful symbolism; an image that is clear to everyone and repeated often in poems, songs, movies, and yes, in books.

And yet, this vivid imagery is limited by it’s very nature. When you pick up a book, it is a finite thing – the content of the book is fixed and scribed onto the pages between the covers. The story therein is constrained by the size of the type, spacing of characters, and dimension of each page. The narrative is limited to the space between the covers, which is always just enough.

Life just isn’t like that. When we open our books for the first time, the pages are all blank. We can’t even write the first few chapters ourselves; we need to give co-authoring credits to our parents and family. As we age and mature, we start to take over the direction of the story, either by our action or inaction, though usually with a liberal sprinkling of both.

If we approach life with a sense of wonder and adventure, we excitedly anticipate what the next page of the story might bring. A life of drifting and inaction tends to make one dread the next page. Going back and re-reading a few previous chapters is always a good idea, to re-celebrate joys, or review poor choices and make some editorial changes for future chapters.

As our lives wind down, and our bodies start to break down, the reader may start to realize the incredible circle that life becomes. We finish our books with a few chapters that again require co-authoring. Perhaps because the writer has become too frail. Or perhaps because there needs to be an unbiased post script commentary on the quality of that life.

The only thing certain is that the book of ones life is never closed. The back cover meets the front cover; we end where we started. From nothing to nothing. And whether you believe in an afterlife, or simply that our bodies decay and we become the source of nutrients for a new form of life, we start again at the beginning, and the circular book of life goes on.

Paused by A.I.

Her life lay suspended.  She collapsed face down into the bed and tried to breath.  Everything seemed to be rocking around her and life had no foothold anymore.  Her past was on one side of her spine and her future’s pages had yet to be turned; so, she lay, face down and waited for things to be righted.

The longer she lay, the harder it was to get up.  The muscles she thought were there seemed to have vanished, leaving her nothing to push up from the ground with.  Besides, she wasn’t quite sure she wanted to turn over – what would she find in this new story that had suddenly become her own.  She couldn’t picture what that new world would look like.  Exhausted, she gave herself up to gravity and just lay there.

But the world stops turning for no one.  Rain came, the sun shone and the heat breathed life back into her life.  Subtly, muscles began to return while the wind whispered ideas in her ears and ruffled her hair.  She began to shift a little, moving here and there – testing new areas of movement.  

One day, her eyes cleared and found herself eager to taste life fully again.  She went to push herself upwards and discovered she had changed.  She was no longer the story she was before.  Over time, she had changed into a starburst that was already meeting the world with a brilliance that would only get better over time.