Remember all of those books you used to read, or movies you used to watch, that were all about true love and passion and happy endings? Remember how, when you were little, you used to dream about finding someone who would be the other half of your heart, who would play the role of Westley to your Buttercup, the Elizabeth to your Mr. Darcy? You believed that you would create your own happily ever after. And then you got a little older and the darkness of reality started to leak around the edges of those dreams until, bit by bit, the white radiance at the center of your soul had turned into a shadowy, convoluted mass. You realized that there really couldn't be such things as happy endings, or true love, or even destiny. You grasped that the reason there are so many works of fiction on the subject was because they were dreams, they represented a utopia that couldn't be achieved. You probably knew that there would have to have been some people who had attained such a sublime goal, but that they were few and far between. You speculated that they were probably as rare as a glimpse of sun during winter at the northern tip of the world. And you said to yourself, "I don't need happily ever after, I'll settle for happy right now." Or even just, "I'll settle for being simply content." .
You sat down and looked at yourself in the mirror and said, "This is the real world and this is me in the real world. I will deal with one thing at a time, as it comes, and I will not look to the future as a source of hope. The future will be the same as today, only my image in the mirror will change. It will not matter what actions I take, or whom I speak to, the world will turn as it always has, day will follow night and night will follow day."
And then something happened. Maybe you caught a glimpse of someone, a stranger, who was walking on the opposite side of the street as you, or maybe you walked into a coffee shop and an old friend was unexpectedly sitting at a table right in front of you. And there was something about that person, the angle that their head was tilted to catch the reflection of a light, the shadowed corner of a bright eye, the movement of a hand as it was placed into a pocket on a cold day. You had this brief glimpse of an action that would, on a normal day, never have caught your eye. But on this day, you stopped and you looked. And suddenly, everything around you stopped too. In this brief moment a spring that was tightly wound inside you sprung loose. You may have literally taken a step back, or simply felt a lessening of a pressure on your chest that you had never realized was there. You took a deep breath and instead of looking passed them, this anomaly, you decided to look at them. And in the directness of your gaze they looked back at you. From this brief moment of eye contact followed an introduction, or a tentative, "Hello, nice to see you again." And then, then you knew. There could be happily ever afters, there could be passion, there could be hope and happiness and maybe even, there could be such a thing as God.
The next time you sat down and looked at yourself in the mirror you said, "This is me and I am beautiful. My actions have consequences and I can direct those actions so that they will be positive or negative. The future will be what I make it out to be. And I have the rest of my life to explore the endless possiblities."
(That was probably the most heavy handed and cliched thing I've ever written, but it made me feel better :) ).
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