For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard and taken heed to words of wisdom. I’ve even echoed those words to others when the situation called for them. Go for a drive without directions and you may get lost. Take that last second shot at the buzzer and you may actually miss. Rush into love, as only fools do, and chances are you will be hurt. Write a novel then seek representation and you should expect a healthy dose of rejections.
Still…we decide to take our chances anyway, don’t we?
Why do you think that is?
I can’t speak for anyone else, but what I do know is that some of us just can’t help ourselves. Men, by nature, tend to believe we are capable of overcoming just about any challenge set forth at our feet. Whether it’s replacing a faucet only to have it still leaking water a year later! (Yes, I actually did this and thankfully my brother-in-law helped me repair it).
Yet we take the family on that road trip with our own directions because we believe that we don’t “need” to stop and ask for directions along the way. Yep, even if we’re thirty miles off-course in the wrong direction, we will find our way back on track.
Taking the last shot? Ah, that’s a competitor’s ideal situation. We want that shot. We need that shot because it validates our self-perception as winners. We know there’s a chance we will miss but we believe in the possibility that we will make it!
As a romantic, and as a writer, I know that for me the idea of love and my love of writing are intertwined like the fate of soul mates. I have taken my chances in love despite the potentially painful outcomes of my past because I often asked: what is a heart if the emotions within aren’t permitted to overflow?
I still believe that one must always allow for their emotions to keep flowing because they are the rivers of your soul. Whether happy or sad, they glide thru you and form the valleys of your heart…. elaborately carving the beauty that lies within you. Akin to the way rivers run along the lands of the Earth…. look at the Grand Canyon now, after millennia of rivers flowing through it! 🙂 It’s what brings you the sediment of wisdom and marks the depth of your love.
Allow this to happen and then, when God has completed his work with you, He’ll bring you someone worthy of your inner beauty. Someone who will appreciate everything that you have become as a result of what you’ve been through instead of being someone who faults you for your past, or lacks the depth with her/himself to value who you truly are… a genuine person, with emotions.
Love, as with writing, becomes a story… the story that we need to tell, and like true love it speaks to the heart! Despite the challenges along the way, I am never discouraged for too long.
What I find even more compelling is that there is no way my soul has ever been able to let go of either. Focused as I am, distracted as I sometimes allow myself to be, and with a mixture of numerous emotions in-between I have this undying need to share my story with the world.
There’s no two ways around it.
I’m simply incapable of leaving my manuscript on a shelf to never be published, or on my Cloud to remain unopened for a lifetime. Just as I breathe to hold the love of my life, to be a dad and a father to my children, I inhale and exhale to be a writer, a published author and a best-selling novelist. This feels inevitable because it’s my passion. It’s who I am and what the flowing rivers of my soul have left in their wake.
Come take a swim in the sea of my story and discover new islands of my imagination!
“Follow the river and you will find the sea.”
~French Proverb
Felix Alexander Writer 