Hold Your Own Pen

As one year ends and a new one begins, it's a great time to pause and consider how our personal stories get written.

We tend to allow our lives to go on with no real thought as to who writes them. We assume our lives are of our own making. At the same time, we bemoan whatever we feel, think, believe we have no control over.

We determine when we rise from sleep in the morning. We choose what we wear. We decide when and what we eat during the day. We live in a particular place because we want to live there.

Yet ~~ still ~~ we complain that we have to wake too early to go to jobs we feel stuck in. Or housing in the neighborhood we would love to live in is way too expensive. Or we would prefer to eat locally grown veggies but they don't grow here in winter. Then there are the bigger things... The boss just put more work on our desk and we aren't done with what we have. The election didn't quite go the way we wanted it to go. The weather is too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry. The dog slid off the porch on the ice and broke a leg. The monthly insurance payment went up by $50... or $500.

Some of these are totally in our control. Some of them less so. Others are not determined by us at all. So are we really in charge of the pen that's writing the story of our lives? Even when it may not feel as though we are, the truth is not quite as simple. The story of our lives is made up of these little building blocks and road blocks. How we choose to react to them, what we choose to do with the information, determines the real story. The importance doesn't lie in each block, each event, but within us. It's visible by the way we present ourselves to the world every time something happens.

The pen we hold as we write our lives is filled with the ink of our attitude and our outlook. Those our the intangible blocks we control. Don't give that control over to anyone else. Hold your own pen.

What are the building blocks you have in your life as the new year begins? What are the road blocks? How do you feel about them? How do you express your feelings? How do you want the story of your life to be written? What do you want others to say/read about you? What is the most important thing you want written about your life as 2017 begins?