You cannot dissect something without killing it.

We think we’re playing detectives, tying clues together, using past experiences to coordinate our next move.

We call our friends, offer them biased clues and invite them into our personal investigations about how our story will end with this character chase we’ve gone on.

We either consciously write, or allow our lives to be written for us by believing bullsh*t someone wrote about us, distracting ourselves with the stories of others and investigating how they will choose to fit into our stories before we can watch it play out.

When reading good books, we hand our imagination over to the author.

We’re busy trying to find clues about what the other authors in our lives are scribing:

“He said he loves me but he can’t be with me. What do you think his deal is?”
“Her mom told me she’s divorced but she told me she’s never been married. Obviously one of them is lying, but why?”

The list goes on and on and usually in circles.

We hand our imagination over to someone else’s plot and forget to write in the pages of our own dreams.

We’re killing our story!

The most radiant kind of happiness I’ve witnessed, is in people who aren’t concerned with other people’s stories (even if other people have a story about them that isn’t favorable). They’re engaged only in the presence of a story they write from a state of pleasure.

They don’t allow what other people are writing to bleed through the pages of the novel they are themselves, writing.

They are present to what is. They are happy with what they have written.

As if someone is handing us a pencil and paper to narrate our own lives with, we then hand the pencil and paper back, confused by all of the other books we’re busy reading—-and we forfeit our moment.

We’re looking for our answers in someone else’s story.

Radiance knows the only place we’ll find our happiness is by writing in the pages of our own.

Years back, I was incredibly nervous to meet a man I really wanted. On our first meeting, the entire hour drive to get to him, I sang in my head (for vibrational effect) over and over again, “I am beautiful. I love me. I’m excited to meet him and he’s excited to meet me.”

Of course, I was lying to myself at the time. (Anyone who has to say that repeatedly for an hour, attempting to create new neuro-pathways of healthy thought patterns is someone who has thought a whole bunch of bullsh*t for much too long.)

Regardless, even though I was lying to myself, it was my first attempt at writing a new character positively into my own story.

I was creating the story that “I” wanted rather than playing detective of his desires, in hopes, I might become them. He ended up loving me, thinking I was beautiful, and we had a cosmic run of love together that required no detective work. Our relationship inspired only presence.

I may not have believed what “I” was writing in the sky of my imagination during the car ride to him, but he read it loud and clear.

When thoughts of self doubt or my hunger for sabotage crept in, I wrote new words. Words I’d never considered writing in the past. I didn’t read into whether what I was writing was true or what he wanted me to write. I wrote what I wanted to have and feel, leaving out the rest.

Writing the story of our own lives commands presence. Presence to what is true for us. It demands our honest focus and never relents.

Playing the detectives in the mysteries of other authors, confuses and distracts us from what’s really alive for us. Presence isn’t concerned with what he said or she said if he or she aren’t written into our story and saying it, “now.”

Presence is only concerned with experiencing itself as it is without making up a motive about someone else’s chapter. It wants to know itself through you and for you to know yourself through it. It only sees what’s directly before it, right now. Presence only hears, feels, tastes and touches itself.

The moment we give into someone else’s drama or begin writing our story in response to the stories of others, we are merely procrastinating on our own longing to write.

Presence doesn’t give a sh*t if he wants you, or she’s lying.

It wants to hold your hand and show you the world right in front of you. The one you’ve been missing by suffocating your creativity in reading summaries of the worlds of others. It wants to give you juicy sentences that need to be written by your soul and dance with you when you read them.

Presence wants to be united with you.

The instance you dissect something outside of this moment, you’re killing the possibility to connect with the peace of presence.

It longs to have you see yourself in it.

The most radiant happiness I’ve seen, is from people who create moments they want to be in, rather than distracting themselves with ones they don’t.

They only write stories that feel good to them. And by way of being present only to the story they are writing, they find a way to live into it. They trust the next page because they know that whatever it is, will feel just as good as now or better. They know this, because they do not have idle hands with their ink. They choose to author.

Their story is written into their radiance, and the universe beckons their magic because it recognizes that their radiance simultaneously commands and experiences presence.

Secretly, we all want to possess this kind of magic.

We can have it by writing a story we actually want to be in, a story we wouldn’t dare kill. We can have it when we stop weaving our words through the pages of other people’s entries.

We’re always creating whether we’re choosing information that has seeped into our psyches by reading from other authors, or writing, ourselves. Hell, we’re creating stories about other people’s stories just so we don’t have to create the one that’s screaming for us to write.

May you create a story that comes to know itself, fully. A story that only reads by being present to what it, itself, has written, word for word, vision for vision, note for note. A story you do not dissect to make sense of a different story you previously read, and believed.

A story in which you experience each sentence with substance by reading only what is written in the moment and diving into it fully. This is the only way to free yourself up into knowing what to write next.

A story that’s so damn juicy you can taste it in your words.

Not the words of others, but the words that give your happiness a voice.

These are the stories of the authors, that even after death, do not die.

These are the stories that make radiance.

Write on, radiant one!

Relephant:

3 Basic Tools For Creating Happiness

Author: Stacy Hoch

Apprentice Editor: Jenny Wise / Editor: Catherine Monkman

Image: Courtesy of Author