Chapters in a Book

Hopefully your life is more like a novel than a comic book or a half hour sitcom on TV.

A big fat novel, with many chapters, with ups and downs, with complex characters, not flat cartoony portraits.  And the most complex character of all is you, with your mixtures of motives,  nobilities and lownesses,  with your diamonds and with your shit.

Let’s assume the chapter that you’re living is somewhere in the middle of the book.

Is it a funny chapter?  A sad chapter?  A confusing chapter?  Are the themes clear or have they not yet emerged?

When you are in the middle of a particularly hard chapter, whatever is going on can be so compelling and demanding that you forget that this is ONE chapter in a much longer book.  

Too often we take what we are experiencing in the current chapter as a summary chapter.   It is worth asking “Is what is going on now fully representative of the rest of the book?”

The last chapters of a person’s life often are extremely difficult to the older person and his or her family.    If your parent or spouse is going through a chapter which includes major health problems or   diminished physical or mental capacities it is quite possible to be absorbed by how terrible things are.

Sometimes it takes the death of the family member and some time afterward for the surviving family to regain an appreciation of the full scope of the older person’s life. 

As time goes on memories are restored from the other chapters.

Committee

It’s like a committee.  Imagine a group of people gathered in a room discussing something, not necessarily in a harmonious way.  But the committee is YOU.  All of the different personalities and voices on the committee are parts of you.  Facets of your personality.  

Some of the voices may bear a striking similarity to actual people, living or dead, who have been in your life.  Your mother.  Your father.   Your teacher.  Your high school rival.

You really like. some of the members of the committee 

And some of the members of the committee you really hate.

I’ve tried to get rid of some of the members of my committee for years.  I wanted to get rid of the stupid Philip.  The sloppy Philip.  The emotionally hungry Philip.  The doubtful Philip.   

When I’d throw them out the door, they’d climb back in the window.

Eventually I discovered that I couldn’t really get rid of any of the unruly troublesome pain-in-the-ass members of my committee.  Eventually I discovered that I didn’t need to get rid of them.  I needed to find a place for them....and that if I found a place for them they didn’t cause as much trouble.