Be glad that you were born. Be glad that you have experienced everything that has transpired in your life. Everything. Even the things you have regretted. Give all the drama and all the comedy equal booking. All of it seemed to happen, and it seemed to happen to you and around you.

Even history that you read about, you took to heart. Your life and your perceptions of it are all stories, beloveds, and aren’t they good? Who could have envisioned the twists and turns of the plot, the characters you would meet, and how you would greet them and what you would make of each occasion?

You have tried to take your story into the future, and you are incapable of finalizing it. Your story plots itself. You may consider certain endings, but you cannot know them. There are too many factors unknown to you. You don’t quite likely know yourself yet. Of course, it is yourself that you are exploring in life. You walk the streets of yourself. You turn the corners of yourself. You read the street signs of yourself. And you meet yourself in every person you meet. Beloveds, you play all the parts in this story you write and the play in which you perform.

Whatever you may have thought, your story has been splendid. It has been a splendid unfolding of yourself. You have preferred some chapters over others, and yet each chapter contributed to the whole grand story. You have been tempered in life, and now you are emerging as a hero in the story of your own life.

Could the story have been otherwise? Could you have made other decisions that would have affected the whole course of your life? Maybe yes and maybe no. Perhaps with different perambulations, you would have wound up exactly in the meadow where you stand now.

Whatever meadow you find yourself in, you can turn in all directions, north, east, south, west, and all the combinations thereof. Each gives you a different view. What is changed, beloveds, but where you looking from and what you look for? You look for sunrise in the east, and sunfall in the west. What is changed, beloveds, but what you happen to be gazing at in a particular moment?

What page of your story are you on? Perhaps you keep ruffling earlier pages. Perhaps you continue certain threads. Perhaps you skip ahead, only to find pages not yet written on.

You do not know how many pages your story will be. You do not have the last word.

Now I shall tell you what to write on whatever page your story is on:

“My story has been amazing. I have followed it with great interest. I spilled ink and crossed out certain scenes, yet always I was an active participant in my life. Even when I ran away, I bumped into myself, and the story of my life continued. I realize now that my story was a passing fancy. Despite whatever I may have thought, as I write these words of this particular novel, I am aware that my life is a splendid panorama. I know my life has been filled with interesting people, and that I am one of them. I know I loved more than I knew, and that I was loved more than I knew, and I know that only love accompanies me now as I walk into the sunset. As I turn what I imagined was the last page, I find there is no last page. My pen is poised and I begin to write a splendid continuation and call it Innocence Regained.”