When It Happens To You- Written 06/28/07

For some, life is a production. Everything must be just so before anyone is allowed to see it. Scenes are carefully rehearsed, costume and makeup are immaculate, and all culminates to a grand finale: success, marriage, sometimes death.

For others, life is an illusion. A trick of the light, a sleight of the hand. The setup, the catch, the reveal. They sit in the audience and ponder how the trick works and how they can duplicate it.

Still others see life as a challenge, an adventure. Always a mountain to climb, a river to ford, a cave to explore. And when they reach the top, the opposite bank, come out the other side, they breathe deeply for a moment, enjoy their victory, and then push on toward the next obstacle to overcome.

And then there's my life.

I don't have the self-control to plan the production, the tenacity to figure out the illusion, or the willpower to forge toward the next challenge with astonishing enthusiasm. For my kindreds and me, life is something else entirely.

It is a broken spotlight during the love song, a slipped card from the sleeve of the magician, an avalanche 20 feet from the summit. Like an old mystery book with the final chapter missing, of a puzzle with only a few lost pieces, life seems to constantly build up our hopes only to cruelly dash them against a cliff wall.

We tragic few seem doomed to always be let down at critical moments. Through no fault of our own, events that, in the life of another, seems to always work out for the best, tend to go awry and leave us clutching at what little we can hold. We hope for nothing more than just the ability to stand our ground and not be swept away by the crashing waves of happenstance.

They tell us to take charge of our own lives, but when we try, that control is brutally wrested away. So we run. We leave to start afresh, hoping that we can then perhaps control the reigns of this runaway stallion called Life. But alas, circumstance is a wicked master that will not lightly set up free. So our struggle continues, always grasping, holding, running, letting go.

C'est la vie.