I’ll be the first to admit that when I was in my 20s, it was incredibly easy to let myself be swept up in something that felt so very much larger than just me. I’d encounter something that captured my imagination, and I’d mentally be seventeen miles away as fast as you could say, “Wait, what?” It was my way, and I’m quite sure my mom and friends grew weary of hearing me wax poetic about the next great thing to come along in my life.
No more. Age may bring wisdom, but for me, it has brought a tempering — not altogether unwanted — of that impulse to read great significance into every new discovery. If anything, I’ve grown a wee bit cynical — somehow, without losing my fundamental optimism. So when something new comes into my world, I tend to hope for the magic while assuming, perhaps even searching for, the worst. It makes for an odd dynamic inside my head, one I continue to come to terms with.
At any rate, something fundamentally different swept in last week. Do you ever have a moment where you’re able to step outside yourself — way, way outside yourself — and sense yourself narrating your story as it unfolds? That happens to me now and then, and I feel a little Harold Crick right now, because my voice-over narration is making all of these really big, bold statements that, frankly, ought to freak me out. They don’t. And they don’t because I believe, with every fiber of my being, that my narrator is completely spot-on right here.