This is from Keri Smith’s book,How to Be an Explorer of the World: Portable Life Museum.  I have this page posted on my desktop, and every couple days, I open it to remind myself to wake up to seeing things anew.  I particularly like the suggestions that are not so familiar to me, like tracing things back to their origins or noticing the stories that are going on around me.

Right at this time, I have a swirl of stories about my off-the-rails youngest daughter.  Raging stories, regretful stories, mean stories, sad stories, frustrated stories, despairing stories.  I also have stories with various endings, including death, dismemberment, embraces and joy.  Sometimes I can’t choose the story I might prefer because it is crowded out by an obsessive story.  Sometimes I see my story as I would like to tell it in a movie or a book.  For example, I went to see Red 2 with Helen Mirren et. al., and got very excited during the scene when she was driving with an Asian hit man in a blue sports car.  She said, “Show me something,” and he put the car into a slo-mo spin as Helen aimed and fired guns out both windows with that deadly, steely gaze.  That is a story I could love. And for those of you who may not see the movie, that moment is minute 2:10 on the trailer.

But back to being an explorer.  To help with my stories, I am choosing #4:  alter your course often.  When I do that, I can dislodge from the stuckness of a bad story and access what is actually happening now, this moment, this breath.