Never forget YOU are the hero of your own story
“Sometimes I just want my life to be more like a fairy tale.”
One of my workshop participants once told me that. And I could relate.
What she meant was, “I wish that I didn’t have to deal with problems… that things would always go my way… that life could be about riding into marmalade sunsets through rolling fields of daisies.”
I couldn’t help but remind her that even the best of fairy tales has conflict and peril and villains and crisis. If they didn’t, no one would watch (or read) them.
Because they would be pretty boring.
In fact, the arc of most of those stories involves a character that sets off on some kind of journey or quest to find that things are not as easy as initially thought. An unexpected setback puts the hero on her heels or knocks her down altogether.
She has to pick herself up, dust herself off and persevere.
It is only a matter of time before she faces another more difficult challenge. But she’s learned a thing or two from the last one. And she relies upon that experience and that wisdom to get her through this one and the next… and the one after that.
Life is like that too.
The major difference between a fairy tale (or an action/adventure movie) and real life is that when you’re watching the character in a story, you are safe in your seat. And when the peril is your own, you’re in the thick of the action – unsure of what will happen next and whether you’ll come out alright.
But this likely isn’t your first rodeo.
You’ve been through a challenge or two yourself. And lived to tell about it. Like the hero in those stories, you too have gained wisdom and insight and strength along the way.
Rainer Maria Wilke once wrote, “The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”
What if the very experiences you have had over the course of your life occurred in perfect order to prepare you for what you would experience in your future?