If my life was a book, I think I'd like to read it.

We were spilling souls and sitting on comfy pillows late at night. That's what you do when you've got life to let out with someone you haven't shared your everyday with in a while. So we gushed and giggled and thought back to our September selves. The ones full of heartache and anger and confusion - what seems now like a lifetime or two ago. We talked about love and happenstance and the choices that make you. The ones that in a moment leave you decimated and flat out on the ground. The times when you're literally lying on the floor, in a puddle of yourself, crying out to your ceiling and the heavens and begging someone, anyone, to answer the question, "Why?"

But sometimes you are granted the opportunity to turn the corner. To put the rocky seas of hurricane waves behind you and find calmer waters and new people and a love for yourself you would never have found without the down-on-the-floor-my-life-feels-like-it's-over kind of nights. She said to me, after reflecting on all the pain of before and all the joy of today -

"If my life was a book, 

I think I'd like to read it."

I've been having this oxymoronic thought lately about decisions and life and the sum of all we do and all we are and how we get to the place called TODAY. So much of my life is just what happens - circumstances completely out of my control, simple happenstance. But that contradicts what we're often told - that it's our decisions that make us. You walk through life making choices and and at the end, your are a sum of the decisions you've made. But so much of what has changed me, struck me to the core, and guided the path of my story has nothing to do with what I wanted for myself at the time. I didn't choose to have my heart broken. I didn't choose for her to turn her back. I didn't choose to have a job offered to me right at the moment I needed it most. The fabric of life is often sewn together in the midst of the ripple effects from the decisions of others.

If I am to believe that - that so much of the way it all plays out comes from what happens to me - it feels like I am discounting the role I play in my own life. I own my story - I admit to my mistakes and rejoice in the triumphs that have come from the choices I've actually made. I'm not afraid to claim what I've done and how it has turned out.

So I'm choosing to live in the land between. It's not a position of indecision. Rather, I've peeled a little under what we accept to be true - that you decide how your life will go and that's just it - and have found a pattern. A pattern of distinguishable happenstance occurrences that present to you a life path you may not have traveled down otherwise. It's less of a choice kind of thing and more of a let's-just-wander-down-this-path-and-see-what-happens kind of thing that never really ends. Different people pop in and out and leave you with love and hurt and fullness and emptiness. You ride the ups and the downs and all along the way little things lead you this way and that and before you know it you look up and find yourself in a place and a time and with people you never would have planned for yourself back at the start.

One of my very best friends (and perhaps the wisest woman I know) describes the notion like this: the act of decision making is not something you do, but the ongoing process of evolving circumstances that we live into - which brings an inner peace to who you are and where you are and what you're doing in this moment, in this place, with these people. Not always forever, but certainly for now.

I've written about letting go - not planning your entire life - because that just doesn't work, or as I often say, "that's not a real thing." This is more than that. This is the step beyond - where you move past the reluctant acceptance that you cannot decide exactly what comes next and you embrace with vigor and joy seasons that come as they will - with gusto and adventure and a sense that the best things are yet to come with a trust that when you do let go you will discover all the things you weren't aware you were looking for. Like gritty, real love. And authentic friendship. A perhaps a sense of self.

In the last two years I've learned that trudging forward without a roadmap doesn't have to be painful or scary. I admit, still, that I have no idea what I'm doing. But I do believe it's about taking the right risks and challenging the narrow notions of what you once thought a life worth living could look like. You just put one foot in front of the other. And make a little choice. And another. And you just keep choosing. And you might not feel it right away, but it's you blazing the trail of your life one little step at a time. 

There's something special about folks who are willing to Let. Things. Be., instead of taking a saw and chisel to every little moment in life that doesn't turn out exactly the way they expected. There is something abundantly beautiful and brave about accepting the unknowns and surprises in your story. It's like riding on the back of a motorcycle for the first time - absolute fear and absolute freedom. And in the same way, you must lean in to the turns on the winding road if it's going to be an enjoyable ride. 

I choose (as much as I can) to waltz with happenstance. To let life unfold as it will - and to celebrate the fact that all those things I did, in synchrony with all the things every one else has ever done, are the things that brought me here. And the not knowing, the bliss that comes from blindness to what happens on the next page of this life, is the best part. I will excitedly keep turning the page, because this story - my story - is one I love to read.