Where Do You Stop The Story?
And on to the next one!
“There is no end, just a place where you stop the story”.
I read this somewhere and it really stayed with me. The fact that this statement can be applied to life in general. Sometimes, it’s a new chapter in the same story. Sometimes, it's a hard stop and the entire story comes to a stop. And at times it's the end of a magnificent trilogy. The story can stop with a cliffhanger, a happy ending leaving you satisfied or a heartbreaking end that leaves you devastated. It's important to identify that the story has stopped, and it's time for investing your time in a new story!
Having turned 24 recently, when I look back at these years of my life, I like to break it down and think of the different stories that my life can be sectioned into.
The stories which I hardly remember but often hear about from my parents about me being a young kid who is obsessed with Teletubbies, who liked to practice “yoga”, loved to take dictation to test her spellings and used to look at the beach waves and get scared saying “paani bhaag raha hai” which means “the water is running”.
Then came a lot of chapters in the “school” and “college” stories, which I think for the majority of the people, account for the most precious, cherished, and treasured times of their lives. It's the period where we make so many memories. It is the one with a lot of friendships, a lot of learnings, new experiences and most importantly it's associated with us growing up. These are some of the most detailed first memories we keep with us for a long time. We make stories in all genres during this phase be it comedy, romance, thriller, and maybe even horror!
After college, you come out of the safety net and into the real world. The genre of the story gets confusing now. It's like those books or movies you go to read/watch without reading the description or seeing the trailer. You have no idea what it's going to be about. You are in it now with no idea what you are in it for! You just need to go with the flow and guess the genre it's going to be, hoping that it's worth the time and effort you spent! And if it's not, you just stop reading the book or watching the movie. That is, you put a stop to the story. And start a new one sometime soon. And the same thing applies to life. We get to decide if we don’t like the story we are in. If we want to create a better story or if we want to keep adding a new chapter to the same story trying to make it a good one. We have the choice to stop the story, start a new one, and again stop that one and on to the next again.
We are definitely the protagonists of all of our own stories. But more importantly, we need to make sure that we are the authors of these stories as well. And it’s on us to influence the next stories that are yet to be released in our own lives. It's exciting and empowering to think of life as a series of our own stories. It’s time to work on the next one when we feel like the old one is done.
We get to be side characters or even main characters in other people’s stories as well. For some people, we will be the heroes and for some, we will be the villains. It’s all on us to decide what role to play in other people’s stories and how deeply we become a part of other stories.
There have been some amazing stories that have constituted my life till now. I look forward to creating many more new stories in my life, and hope to have plenty of bestsellers!
What about you, do you look back and feel you have has a wide variety of genres in your life stories? Or has it all been typecasted into something similar? What would you want the next story to be like?
