Ours and the Ones that Change Us

Right now I'm sprawled on our futon as evening sinks into afternoon.  Winter evenings are like that.  In the summer there's more warning for the change.  Winter evenings sneak up on you, delirious, grinning that now it is dark and there is nothing to be done about it.  There is nothing as mystery filled and yet gorgeous as a winter sunset though.  This blog post is not about the pros and cons of winter.  That was just a side trip.  This post is about stories, the leafy and coffee stained ones written down kind, the dusty ones with creases and marks in the corner.  At school my friends joke that they're going to write up a list of all the movies I haven't seen.  I hadn't realized how many movies and TV shows I'd missed until I went to school.  I watch movies, plenty of them, but growing up I read a lot of books.  I'm okay with that.  But whether it's a book or a movie, there's just something about stories, and the kind of stories you can't forget.  They pop into your head while waiting at the bus stop or fidgeting in class.  Those kind of stories help us remember that we are human.  They help us remember that our bones are connected to a soul, that we're not just veins and arteries. They help us remember what it means to be a human, what it means to live.  Over break, I've been thinking a lot about stories. "laughing" reading Don Miller's book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and seeing The Secret Life of Walter Mitty might have something to do with that.  I've been thinking that I want to live a really good, story, a first rate one.  A story that once you close the last page, makes you better for having read it.  Those are the best stories, and I have been thinking a lot lately about what that looks like. "laughing" maybe that will be a future blog post. Who knows? The tricky thing about living a story is that you don't know how the one you're in ends. But I do know Someone who does.  I trust that Someone. For now, let's raise a toast to stories: the ones that are ours and the ones that change us.