Brian’s Reflection: Monday, September 24, 2007


Life's like a movie. Write your own ending.
Keep believing, keep pretending.

- Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets,
born on this day, 1936


Jim Henson died young. That’s the way Life is. We never know. We are promised nothing and there are no guarantees.

“Pretending”? I would have written, “keep creating!”.

But Jim was right. Life is indeed what we make it. We can write our own ending. We know what we believe, what we yearn for, what we hope for our Life. We are not in the hands of Fate - I have never believed that. Do we have to “surrender” to certain realities? Yes. But I don’t see that as Fate - something we don’t have any opportunity to engage with, respond to, tell to go to Hell. Life is funny. It can all look like it’s all out of our control. But while some things are, there is a lot that isn’t. Including how we choose to respond, work with, challenge, deny power to.

Basically, I do believe. I believe that Life will indeed be what we shape it to be. Faith helps us to adjust as things change in our Life. As our health changes, our vision changes, our courage changes, our flexibility changes.

We are not “victims of circumstance”, despite the fact that circumstance requires us to adjust. We are people with a free will, with an amazing capacity for flexibility and resilience.

Some people think that Faith is “whistling in the dark”. No. Faith is acting out of our knowledge that, like “God”, we have the God-given capacity to “write our own ending”. If it turns out the way we visualized, we chuckle. If it doesn’t ….. we chuckle and rewrite the screenplay!

Brian+