Meri's Musings

When I was in the year-long memoir writing class at University of Washington, the instructor extraordinaire Theo Pauline Nestor said that this Rolling Stones song was the perfect way to remember the narrative arc of a memoir. You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometime you just might find you get what you need. Think about it. Life is filled with frustrations, with detours from the path  we think we're supposed to follow. But sometimes, once we're pushed off "our" path we find the new one takes us to strange and wonderful places. We don't always know what we need. Sometimes we learn by  accident or adversity.

December can be a hard time for many people,  who keenly feel their life losses  at a time  when they expect to feel nothing  but joy and celebration.  Instead of expecting holiday times to be a perpetual  infusion of happiness, we should learn to  identify  small,  fleeting moments of joy  in everyday things -- a stranger's smile a surprise meeting with a friend an outrageous pair of tennis shoes finding a quote that resonates with our soul seeing a beautiful thing in a store window hearing a song that reminds us of falling in love the hummingbird unexpectedly hovering near a window and not wait for the staccato  and flash of fireworks  and the shushing sounds of angel wings to signal joy's arrival. For if we wait for the ruffles and flourishes to tell us it's time to take notice, we will have missed a thousand little episodes of joy.  That would be a damn shame. And for those of us who write,  we must...