Writing Act III – Accepting the Reality
It is terrifying and exhilarating to realize that our story is bigger than us, that in fact, it does not even belong to us, that we are simply a channel.
Writing a story is somewhat of a setup. We begin with excitement, only to realize that our story has asked everything of us. We begin to wake up to the greater freedom that our unconscious has been seeking, something that lives at the edges of our imagination. Our soul is not going to settle for survival. It wants more.
We do this sometimes, we think, God, just get me through this day, or month, or childhood, or life. We just want to survive. It can be frightening to ask what if? To inquire into the possibility of real freedom.
But asking what if is the stuff of great fiction. Asking what if is the stuff of Act 3. Act 3 is about surrendering the old story. What if we allowed our idea of our story to collapse? What if we accepted that we just didn’t know. Wouldn’t we be exactly where our hero is? And how would that alter our perception? Well, hasn’t the hero spent the entire story pursuing his “idea” of how he thinks things should go? And how has that been working? It hasn’t.
Act 3 is where a paradigm shift occurs. It happens in our hearts as a result of the surrender. This is one of those things that is difficult to teach, but not impossible. The challenge is that we must trust completely our hero’s transformation, even if we don’t know how it is going to happen. Sounds sort of like life, doesn’t it? We must bypass all of our conditioning, all of our cynicism, all of our ambition, and trust in that childlike place, that place where we are naturally moved by the truth of our story.
This is not weak sentimentality. I am not talking about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and tugging at the heart strings. I am talking about love, the basic truth of the universe that lies at heart of our story, despite the tone, despite the genre, despite whether it is a happy ending, or a nihilistic one. The fundamental nature of love lives at the heart of every story. It is the thing that is always on the table.
As we inquire more deeply, images may appear that begin to reveal an ending. We will know the ending is right because it rings like a bell. We have found some kind of order in the chaos. Our hero has been returned home.
Let me know your thoughts.
