You already have an amazing story to tell.

Many will go through life thinking they have to be someone else to have a story worth telling, to succeed, to be exceptional in something, like Picasso:

“My mother said to me ‘If you are a soldier, you will
become a general.  If you are a monk, you will become
the Pope.’  Instead I was a painter and became Picasso.”

In his new book, Erwin McManus writes this of Picasso: ‘Pablo had nowhere else to go, no one else he could become but Picasso’.

This is true for each of us.  We have nowhere else to go but to become more of who we are. and herein lies our story.

Sometimes our stories are realised by identifying our dreams and turning them into reality; sometimes our stories are defined by some need which calls to us – Harriet Tubman’s story caught my attention in this way.  Harriet was born into slavery in the United States but escaped to the north, only to realise this is what she had to help others to do, and so she returned, was a founder member of the Underground Railroad.   Then something else came to mind – Kintsugi, the Japanese art of restoring (restorying?) broken pottery.  The repairs incorporate gold, resulting in objects which appear more beautiful and poignant than their unbroken counterparts.

To know and live your story is to be successful.  This isn’t about telling a series of incidents from our lives as if they are a story.  Oftentimes we tell these little stories without knowing or realising how they fit together.  Our story appears when we’re able to reincorporate these smaller stories into a larger story – a narrative arc – understanding how all everything comes together, restorying into something of beauty.  (My mind pictures a story equivalent of kintsugi gold in this.)

We can’t always control where a story will go but we can come to embrace every part of it.  It strikes me that to do this is a courageous thing to do.  To share it with others is a generous thing.  And to live courageously and generously, well, that’s to live wisely.