Much of my own struggle as I grew older had to do with realizing I had to shrink a bit … to lower my sights, lessen my expectations, settle compromise, and surrender. I think most of us live out our lives in ways we hadn’t planned on, much less thought we wanted. What was your dream? Success (whatever that means to you)? Romantic love? Traveling the world? A family? These are just a few huge dreams, but think of all the little ones that happen all the time, day in and day out. It can all be very hard and discouraging to have to constantly give them up, especially as we age and have to grapple with all the things we think we missed out on. What’s to do? Well, we can let regret occupy all those empty spaces that weren’t filled. Or we can regard our lives as epic. When we live as though it’s all a long narrative told on a grand scale of time and place, and that each of us is a larger-than-life protagonist who is heroically striving, we’re taking a much richer view of it all. We’re turning our lives into something beautiful. The word ‘epic’ stems from words that originally meant a tale or story, promise, prophecy, proverb, and to speak. Let’s ‘speak’ our existence by turning it into the story we wish to read. When the road seems long, boring, hard, or troubled, remember your innate heroism simply in being alive. There are equal measures of pleasure mixed in with hardship in every story. Your trail takes you to places that might surprise you but they don’t have to dismay you. Start a new chapter of your heroic poem whenever you like, or tramp through the fields of the one you’re in with zest and poetry. When it’s hard to get up in the morning because you dread the day ahead or the cold is too bitter, take the long view. This verse too will culminate in the coming of spring.
