An Echo in Time

by Boo Walker

You chose Fear over love, Distance over touch. You chose Running and denial, Burning words And breaking hearts. You chose Ordinary over extraordinary, Complacency over disruption, Simplicity over greatness, The mundane over magic. You chose Smallness over expansion, Ease over beauty, Solitude over connection, Comfort over clarity. You chose over, And over, And over. And your choices Challenged me To choose, Too. I chose myself Over you.

He couldn’t possibly comprehend the agony of being human, of working an uninspiring job, of constantly trying to live up to the overachievers surrounding you, of worrying and worrying and worrying about your parents, one of whom you don’t even know why you care about in the first place.

With family constellations, a family exists within a cloud, a sort of energy field that includes dead family members. All my ancestors are connected to me. If something bad happened to them, or if they did something bad, I could be suffering from it too.

“You have to make sure you’re listening to the right voice.”

She can feel the pain of her family in her blood. She can taste the disgust she feels for herself and the rest of her family. A part of her can see the appeal of swinging her steering wheel hard to the right and seeing what happens, finding some peace for once. And yet she does want to break the cycle. She wants to find a way toward happiness.

Like books, dolls were an escape, a way for her to disappear into an imaginary world

“I believe you’ve been chosen to break your family free from generations of pain.” Charli looks at her. “Why me?” Frances smiles warmly. “I think you’ll find out. And what an honor it is.”

There are strong forces in your subconscious that are creating patterns of bad luck and even tragedy in your life. The same might go for a lot of your family members. But until someone does something about it, those patterns will never stop.

What a miserable existence to have no say in how your own life played out.

“Carl Jung writes, ‘It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which passes on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to . . . complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.’”

Perhaps she doesn’t have faith, but she wants to have faith, which is maybe the first step. She wants to believe that she’s not the waste of flesh that she feels like now. She wants to have faith in the idea that maybe she does matter, that she’s somehow part of the grand design out there in the cosmos.

Great art is like great fiction, she thinks: telling and transporting.

There she is back on the sidelines again, watching everyone else do their thing. She’s not sure what’s worse, the fact that she’s not doing anything great in her life, or that she can’t seem to find enough joy in her heart to feel happy for her best friend, who achieved her career dream. Yeah, the second part is worse, she decides. What kind of monster makes it about themselves in a moment like this?

The sad truth is Charli can’t see herself ever having some sort of success story. Maybe that’s why she pulled the plug on the bookstore after the debacle with the lease. Her failure was already written in stone.

“Now that I know your story, I can see that it’s the challenges in your life that have made you such an extraordinary person.”

We sometimes get stuck in our own little worlds, but things we can’t possibly fathom are happening all around us.

I went searching for a cure for my sickness, but it turned out my sickness was the cure.”

You’re trying to fix all these things to reach a point of healing, but the healing is already taking place by you being on the journey.”

I don’t know that anyone’s life is gravy. So we move on and find people that we love and that love us, and we do our best to be our best. But we’re not always going to be. Love is about being there for someone at their worst. It’s easy to be there when things are good.”

Not all bad men feel regret toward the end.

Sometimes things don’t work out the way in which you design them, but they work out just right, all the same.

I think there’s no doubt that when you’re doing the right things, the world seems to open up for you.”