“Be an empty page, untouched by words.”- Rumi

This quote popped up on my Facebook thread today and it called insistently for a response. As a wordsmith, it puzzled me at first. “How can I be untouched by words?,” I pondered. They are my life blood and what makes me tick. They are downloaded from wherever they are at the moment. They feed my soul and delight my heart.

Then I looked at the quote again and got a sense of what the ecstatic poet from the 13th century might have been implying when he offered them. What if we could begin each day anew, a tabula rasa, a fresh, unwrinkled, unscrawled upon sheet, just waiting for the Divine hand to inscribe whatever is designed for that day?  There is story we tell ourselves from the moment we are cognizant about how things ought to be and if they are not to our liking, we decide, consciously or unconsciously to be distraught about them. Today, while speaking with someone, that topic arose. He has struggled with the idea that life is a series of frustrating incidents all linked together and that he has no incentive to want anything, since he feels it never works out anyway. We joked about his Eeyore-like qualities and he sadly agreed that he had them. I then suggested that he re-write the narrative, reminding him that on occasion, for as long as I have known him, some things have worked out as he wanted. The more he was willing to change the story he was creating, the greater the likelihood that he would be happier with the progression of script. He sighed and agreed that it might.

In my own life, I am not immune. Although they are not my genres; I have been known to write suspense-horror fiction that scared the crap out of me. I much prefer ecstatic poetry a la Rumi and Hafiz. I would rather write happily ever after stories.

What I do know and have witnessed it so many times in my own life and those of others I know, is that by re-writing the lines, changing them up, feeling into them, the last page of the book changes. Someone had actually suggested writing a short story with that theme…in which a woman writes a book and each time she looks to the back, the ending alters.

Every day we write the book of our lives.  Edit at will.

Because the rest is still unwritten.