Midday. A young woman hurries into a deli. She scans the drink cases, hurls open a smudged glass door, and pulls out a Coke. Caffeine. To keep going. She waits behind a large man who has ordered a bagel with butter and a coffee light and talks ceaselessly about the weather. The woman digs into her purse, collecting coins from its depths. She counts. She has it exactly. From behind the man, still talking, she waves her Coke and places the coins in a small stack on the counter. She slips out of the store.

“Miss!” a voice says. “Miss!”

She turns to see a man come from the store. The clerk behind the counter. He is now on the sidewalk, beckoning her to return. She retraces her steps, stands inches from him. “I paid for this,” she explains.

“I know.”

“What then?” she asks.

“Your change,” the man says, staring into her eyes.

“But I counted. It’s $1.25, right?” she asks.

“Not that kind of change,” he says. “Real change. What would you change – about you – given the chance? One thing.”

She smiles. Studies his eyes. They are dark and kind. Shaped like almonds, glittering in late summer sun. She realizes something. Something tiny and tremendous. She never even saw this man, or his eyes, before. Even though she was standing there, looking at him. She looked, but she did not see.

“I would linger longer,” this woman says. “In my moments. I miss too much.”

He nods. And smiles. Turns to go.

“Sir,” she says, this woman.

“Yes?”

“What is your name?” she asks.

“Delta,” he says, grinning, playing with her perhaps. Laughter tumbles from him as he steps back in the store.

“One more thing!” she calls, uncapping her soda.

“Yes?”

“Thank you. For my change.”

She sips Coke. And realizes that, today, she is already awake. That sometimes stopping is as good as going.

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• What’s your change? One thing you would change about yourself or the way you approach the world?
• Do you ever wish you lingered longer in your moments? Do you also have trouble being truly “present”?
  
• Do you agree that here are gems of realization buried in the rubble of the everyday?
• Do you have a healthy relationship with caffeine?
• Do you ask people you encounter only briefly their names?

This post is a little piece of fiction, but for a charming and true story about a young woman and exact change, please check out this post from my friend Lauren at Embrace the Detour!

This weekend, I saw Eat, Pray, Love with Mom, Sister C, and Sister T. Admittedly, I had read only the first fifteen pages of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir from which the film is adapted (Toddler was a wee one then and I didn’t have an abundance of free time), but still I was excited to see it. The movie was good, the scenery was exquisite, and Julia Roberts didn’t disappoint.

At one point in the film, Roberts (who plays Gilbert on her three-stop journey of self-discovery) visits an abandoned ruin in the middle of Rome. I can’t remember the surrounding details exactly, but she says something like:

“Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.”

These words struck me. They struck me so powerfully that I whipped out my phone in the middle of the packed theater and jotted them down. So I could come back to them. And here I am. Coming back to them.

Gilbert’s story of self-ruin and subsequent self-transformation is stunning, but it is also extreme. After divorcing her husband she leaves all that she knows to travel and find herself. She devotes a year of her life to eating and praying and loving, all ways of exploring her own personal ruins and rebuilding her life. I can appreciate this tale, but I cannot relate to it wholly.

What I can relate to though is the more subtle idea of crumbling and creation. The notion that things must fall apart in order to come together again. The concept that chaos is where order is born. There is something immensely encouraging about these ideas.

There are times when I feel the earth shaking beneath my feet. There are moments when I detect decay – of control, of happiness, of identity. There are points in my writing when I feel like my story is shredding itself to nothing.

These times are tough. They test me.

I am realizing now, in this very moment, that these times are tiny moments of existential and creative ruin, of fertile unraveling. Maybe cracks must form for wholeness to manifest? Maybe uncertainty must reign for understanding to alight? Maybe questions must creep – through our lives and minds and stories – for answers to come?

This realization – that a good, full life entails moments of meaningful destruction and disorder, of poetic ruin and rubble – is worth more, far more, than the price of admission.

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• Have you read Gilbert’s book or seen the movie? Thoughts?
  
• Do you buy the idea that ruin can be a gift?
• Have periods of transformation in your life been preceded by moments of ruin?
• Have you ever gone to a movie for fun and walked away with a shift in outlook?
  

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, and didn’t,

bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.

Honore De Balzac

Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like if I was still practicing law. If I was still clicking away in marble corridors between conference rooms. If I was still wearing pinstripes and pearls. Would I be happy? Would I have found my place, my way, my voice? Would I be respected, revered, even feared? Would my heart and head and home be different places than they are today?

What if I had never made the leap? What if I had never listened to that voice, soft at the time, that said: You want to write? What if I had stayed there, in that tall building, at my desk piled high with documents that numbed me? What then? Would my swelling need to tell stories have faded away? Would I have forgotten my slow-forming dream to write books? Would I have shelved my deepest urge to weave words into tapestries unique and universal?

I don’t know. But I don’t think so.

I imagine that my desire to do something different, to be something different, would have seeped, a glorious gray or deep bloody red, over the black and white life I tried to convince myself of. I imagine that words and sentences and stories would have crept their way into my mind, burrowing in beautifully, until I paid them some attention.

I don’t know.

Where do dreams and desires go when we deny them? Where do the parts of us we can’t pursue end up? What happens to the whole of existence, the fabric of our being, when there is so much bleeding?

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• Have there been vocations you wanted to pursue and didn’t?
  
• Do you ever wonder what your life would be like if you’d taken a different path?
  
• Do you think that dreams and desires disregarded (because of fear, prudence, etc) come back to haunt us?
• Do you think identity is one part the being of who we are and one part the bleeding of colors of who we could have been?
  

I have a tie-dye of stories inside me. True and imagined. Sentences stir and swirl, waiting patiently to be freed. Words collide and commingle. Ideas dance. Beginnings and ends twirl and curl. Characters arrive and settle, speaking softly of what they will do. Conflicts swell and subside. Colors crescendo, splash and fade.

Into blinding blankness.

The blank page. It is a thing, yes. A rectangle of paper. A bright screen, unmarred. But it is also more. The blank page is emptiness. Void. Nothingness.

But the blank page is also space. Possibility. A fresh start. A canvas for becoming.

And so. We can choose how we see life’s blank pages. And this decision? This choice? It is important. Not just for writers. For all of us. Because life is full of blank pages. Pages of incandescent white waiting for color, for texture, for story. It’s up to us to fill these pages, isn’t it? If we don’t fill the pages of our own stories, won’t someone else?

Today, I sit here. Facing another blank page. Another day. It stretches before me like most others, benevolent and bare. I will fill it with snuggles and smiles and tears and tantrums and errands and dreams.

Today, I sit here. Facing a pile of blank pages. My next book. It sits before me, whispering words that are scary and soothing.

Write. These are your pages to fill. This is your story to tell.

Today, I will do it. I will throw paint. I will write words. I will fill pages.

It is that simple.

(It is never that simple.)

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• Do you agree that there is something inspiring and unsettling about life’s blank pages?
• Do you agree that if we don’t fill our own pages ourselves – with words and stories of our choosing – someone else will?
• How will you fill the blank page of your day?
  
• How do you hope to fill the blank pages of your life?
• As a writer, are you daunted by the blank page?
  

In the next five years…

I hope to publish at least two more novels. Stories that are quirky and crisp and loved.

I hope to have at least one more child. A child who is healthy and happy and embraced by big sisters.

I hope that Mom finds love. Love that is not a replacement, never a replacement, but a compelling next chapter.

I hope to learn how to cook and bake and drive a car.

I hope to accept myself for who I am. And have been. And am becoming.

Because there is always becoming. Thankfully.

_____________________

I think so many of us are fearful for some reason of saying what we hope for out loud. Maybe we feel that we will jinx ourselves. Perhaps we feel greedy or selfish for wanting, for wanting more. Possibly, we worry that our wishes will be laughed at or not come true if told. I’m not sure. But I think it is so important that we acknowledge and articulate – concretely – our personal dreams and desires. Without identifying these dreams and desires, do we really participate in our evolution as people?

So, today is your day. What do you hope for in the next five years? For you. Don’t be shy.