I’m preparing to audition next month for Musical Theatre Southwest’s production of Man of La…
A MILLION MIRACLES
I absolutely love it when things fall into place — when the variables get settled, the questions get answered, and things just click.
Who doesn’t crave this feeling, right? We’re wired to experience it — conflict/resolution, discord/harmony, chaos/order. We look for and find the patterns. We seek and discover the inherent structure and alignment. We ask questions and receive understanding.
It’s the deeply satisfying conclusion to almost every narrative, both fictional and especially in our real-life stories. All the disparate elements that have been shifting and swirling in discomforting uncertainty finally resolve into something meaningful, something complete.
That which was becoming finally is. Where the movement and momentum has been taking us, we at last are.
And it’s always the convergence of a million million miracles. It’s the product of an unfathomably complex sequence of circumstances and happenings and choices, our own and everybody else’s. It’s always in some way the result of a bunch of impossible-to-prepare-for accidents. We say things like, “We couldn’t have planned this, the way it worked out!… Isn’t it amazing the way it all came together?”
But here’s the thing that I forget sometimes: we’re wired not just to experience such convergence and harmony, we’re here to create it. We make the sense. We actualize the denouement. And our own lives are the upshot of it all.
It’s usually not too hard to find this in retrospect. Looking back, we can consider how one thing led to another and another, and — ta da! — here we are. In hindsight, it all looks sort of inevitable; everything that happened, happened. And if we’re so inclined, we can declare an empowering context and meaning for it all. Whether we’re dancing on top of the world or trying to recover ourselves, we can claim a meaning and context that plants us firmly in the saddle of choice and possibility. Like: “I wouldn’t have chosen for everything to go exactly the way that it did, but it did, and now here I am ready to create what comes next!”
I say stuff like that about twenty times a day, and it’s good stuff.
But then what I usually do is start freaking out about the myriad variables and uncertainties and things that could go wrong still ahead of me. I forget that I just made up all the meaning for the entire history of the universe up to this point. So I get scared again. Ugh.
What if we could remember that the million miracles that led to this moment will continue as a million miracles streaming out of this point? What if we could approach our lives and the world as an endless progression of perfection, a parade of possibility? And what if we could hold a vision of our own great creativity, as authors/editors/interpreters of it all?
We can, I think. It takes practice, and we have to give ourselves a break over and over, but we can do it. And I believe it will make all the difference.
I can’t wait to see you this Sunday, September 22. Service at 10:00 am, with Patty Stephens and the Bosque Center for Spiritual Living CHOIR! XO, Drew
© 2019 Drew Groves