a series of mini-lives

Transformation. How many times can it happen in one lifetime?

People often say things that are wistful and tinged with regret. It is easy to look back and miss what once was. It's easy because time has a way of fading the edges of pain. They say hindsight is 20/20 and in some ways I suppose we are able to look back and get more of a bird's eye view of past life events. Hopefully we dissect the past enough to learn from it once the raw emotion has faded. But I think as a human race we are more inclined to look backwards with sentimentality. The good 'ol days don't really exist, you know. Even Mayberry had its issues.

But I digress. What I meant to say is that I am daily astonished to remember that I live in Virginia. This life is so very different from the one I had anticipated for myself. In fact, when I look back, what I see so far is a series of mini-lives. It's as though I were the same character in a bewildering variety of settings. My life hasn't been that long really. I'm what, a third of the way through an average (American) life-span? But I haven't lived one life, I've lived many. One day we should get a big cup of coffee and talk about our mini-lives together. There are good stories there just waiting to be told.

Perpetual life-change inspires me to see that I am not stuck in one life pattern. I will always be becoming. Each season of life, each set of experiences and relationships, brings out and refines a new element of my character. Sometimes a mini-life is characterized by success. Sometimes it resonates with the theme of failure. But what others see as failure has begun to look like freedom to me. Every failure was birthed out of risk. Fears that are faced are fears that lose their power. Whether we succeed or fail, we grow more free with each attempt to reach outside our predefined lives.

We are all dynamic characters. You can't live any sort of life as a static, one-dimensional archetype. It's just not possible. We're fluid, we rotate in and out of roles, and most of the time we don't see it happening. Yet life has a strange continuity in its diversity. I am who I have always been, but I am also becoming who I was always meant to be, who God created me to be.