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from Judith Viorst, via OriginalSara:

I’ll have no trumpets, triumphs, trails of glory.
It seems the woman I’ve turned out to be
Is not the heroine of some grand story.
But I have learned to find the poetry
In what my hands can touch, my eyes can see.
The pleasures of an ordinary life.

It might be the curse of the middle-ish class American 30-something- or maybe that’s just when it hits and it sticks around for awhile.  I’m pretty sure we all get to the point where we realize that by now, by this point in our lives, we were supposed to be doing something that we’re clearly not doing, or not doing right, anyhow.  Whether it’s writing our memoirs or already having 2 bestsellers, or being 3 or 4 rungs up the payscale above where we’re at, or maybe even “by now I was supposed to have 2 kids and a Yorkie and 6 months pay in savings in the bank”- I don’t know a single person that I am close with that can honestly say that they think they are as magnificent as they’d planned on being by now, and just like everyone else I keep time with, I indulge in these thought processes.  I also try- with mixed success- to keep in the forefront of my mind that that’s exactly what it is- an indulgence.  I may not be a doctor/movie star, but I am successful and cushioned enough that I’m not spending all my time worrying about BigRealProblems, like shelter and abuse and whether the water is potable and whether there’s a man with a machete outside the house… but that’s another tangent.  Anyhow- I have the luxury of some navel-gazing.

So, what is “success,” on the personal level?  Who makes the rules as to who gets to be the heroine?  It’s all about perspective, isn’t it?  See, I don’t want to be a RockStar because I want to be famous.  I want to be a RockStar because I’m worthy of being known and because I want to be considered a person worth knowing of.  There’s a big difference there.  I want the validation, but not the paparazzi.  Of course, in the global sense of the word- I’m not doing so well in either regard… but global doesn’t really matter that much if what you’ve got at the micro-level is genuine.

Somebody I care a great deal for but don’t get to interact with often shared something  with me a few months back.  I’m truncating several bits in the interest of preserving some iota of privacy, but hopefully, the point still gets across:

This was big, and I didn’t fully realize it at the time.  But… years ago, the moment I stepped onto your pontoon boat and the feeling I experienced when I did so ended up being the driving force behind me heading down the career path I am on now.  Before that day, I hadn’t been on a boat in four years or so and I didn’t fully realize how much I missed that feeling until that day.  And now, five years later, I’m gainfully employed,  have new doors opening all the time, am _happy_ where I am and with what I am doing, and I have you to thank in no small part for that.

Yeah… that’s kind of RockStar in my book, even if all I thought I was doing at the time was inviting a friend to go out on the lake with me for a bit, and upon further reflection, I’m fully ok with playing a lesser heroine in somebody else’s grand story, and if I can accomplish that accidentally while just living out my own ordinary life, I think that’s just fantastic.

Holy crap, that didn’t go where I thought it was going to.  Either way, thank you, Sara, because your well-timed quote gave me a moment (or 4 days of moments, more accurately) to reflect on the idea that incidental actions can have great big beautiful consequences, and they can lend to the greater stories being written.

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