I have been thinking a lot lately about the people that pass through our lives—those that stay and make themselves comfortable for a while, certainly, but even those that are the experience of only an afternoon, or perhaps even a few moments. How is it that a conversation that I had with an old woman in a grocery store ten years ago, or a twenty-year-old guy at the table next to me at Starbucks last fall, can have such impact all these months and years later? As for the people who enter our lives and stay for a time…how can we not expect to be changed by them? How can we cope with the imprint they make in our minds and hearts when they are gone? I have had many people in my life recently who have been ripped from me. Sometimes I have been glad to see them go, and yet at the same time they have left a gaping wound. Others I have wanted to cling to, and their absence is too painful for conscious contemplation. I usually think of these things as fodder for character development (and in a very real sense that is why I am bringing it up now). But I have been realizing that more than those people being ‘characters’ in my life, they have served the critical, and awful, role of creating my Character. I have never in my life been so aware of myself changing as I have been these last few years. I have never been so clearly able to point to my ‘old self’ and ‘old views’ as a newer and different version of Me emerges.
So I guess my point is this: pay attention to the characters that pass through your life. Think about them, and write about them…but perhaps more importantly, mark the imprint they make on you. Their psychic footprints form the subtly changing contours of our Identity—for better or for worse. This is the Journey toward who we are becoming. This is part of what it means to be human.
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Wendy Picard GorhamWendy lives and works in the midst of words everyday--English teacher by profession, and writer by passion! Archives
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