The confusion is one we all experience - sometimes for a lifetime. It comes from defining ourselves by the storyline that’s currently going on and losing sight of the bigger picture - our life.

You can either have your life be a collection of stories or you can set out on a path that allows life to freely flow through you regardless of content.

Stories trap you in a recurring scene. It’s like “Groundhog Day” for real.

Just listen to the stories that other people tell and retell and then listen to your own. What you will discover are the pickets that keep you fenced in.

Stories are filled with reasons and those reasons become justified, and then justifications become our jailer.

Stories chain us to the post of no growth. We may have glorious aspirations to move but our story keeps us tethered to the predictable plot line.

People like stories and it’s a wonderful way to communicate the essence of a timeframe. Where the story becomes problematic is when you define it as your life. We take a set of events and weave them together and present them as our life versus being our life’s situation.

Think of a “sitcom” on TV. Sitcom stands for “Situational Comedy.” Actors are put into situations where there is a set of circumstances that’s scripted to lead to a comedic outcome. The thing to remember is the frame they operate in is preset. The same is true with stories in real life.

Once we set the storyline we are bound to the same dialogue and the same results - comedic or otherwise.

Our lives have to become more like” Improv” in order to move past our boundaries. The rule of improvisational comedy or acting is that you have to take what’s given to you and turn it into something else. It’s not a pre-scripted storyline that leads you to the same predictable place. It’s the art of flowing to where life takes you.

We all have situations in our lives. What we need to recognize is that every situation presents a choice. We can choose to let the situation define our life and become our story, or we can choose to improvise and see where life takes us.

If I have one quibble with God it would be this: You should have given us fear of the known.

It’s the fear of the unknown that keeps people stuck with their stories.

Who would you be without your story? Improvise and find out.

All the best,

John