Writing a happy ending...

Sorry for the lack of posts. I've been out of town for the past eight days.


People love a happy ending – well most do.

Someone told me they didn’t believe in happy endings. Okay, so maybe they didn’t buy into the canned stereotypical happy ending, but you have to believe in a happy ending. There are happy endings in life, but rarely do they mirror what we are entertained by.

We are all conditioned from an early age that perfect is inevitable. Fairy tales depict the perfect scenario. There is a handsome prince with his wavy locks that blow just right in the breeze of perfect temperature and speed. He has a trusty steed who never leads him astray. The prince is romantic and always speaks the words that make a princess melt. He arrives in heart stopping dramatic fashion (usually climactic music) saves the princess from evil or dragons or fire in the castle tower or whatever, you get the drift. She swoons, or he kisses her to break a spell, she gets on his horse and they ride into the sunset and eternal bliss.

I’m pushing 30 and I can safely say that no prince has ever ridden up on a steed and whisked me away to happiness. The closest I have been to eternal fairy tale bliss was a muddy pickup truck, bad grammar and the ability to belch the alphabet. I digress.

My question is this, when does the fairy tale happen? Have I been Snow White, was I sleeping off a bad apple when my prince came to rescue me? The answer is no, well, hell no.

The happy ending is perception. There are people who make truckloads of money writing the happy ending. Their job is to make people feel good when they leave a theater, put down a book, or close the cover as a child falls asleep. If there were no happy endings the world would be a dark place – darker than it already is.

Everyday life is a blink. Life is a short story in a library of infinite masterpieces written by some of the greatest minds to ever grace this planet. Each individual is responsible for writing their own story. We all put into actions the legacy we want to leave, we put on paper the words we want people to remember us by.

Life is not always gift wrapped as some of us come to expect. Life hands us words, and those words range in meaning, origin and spelling. The vocabulary we are handed makes life unpredictable, unfair and unruly. We have to arrange the words to make thoughts, sentences and phrases. We have to have faith that the one handing us our words will have the correct punctuation to complete our story.

Without that faith you have a collection of words and bad grammar. You have nothing worth reading. We all compose our own life masterpiece and we can not allow someone else to compose our happy ending. We have to string the words together that will make our ending a happy one.

We write our own happy ending.