Becca Rowan is a writer and the author of Life in General, a collection of essays about mid-life as experienced by an American woman in the 21st century. Becca loves creating connections by sharing stories on her popular blog.
"A little rebellion now and then is a good thing." Thomas Jefferson
Mr. Jefferson should know, shouldn't he? After all, he and his cohorts instigated the rebellion which led to the creation of these United States.
Most of us are never involved in that kind of large scale rebellion. But I think each of us harbors an inner rebel that occasionally yearns to break free.
Write about your
Inner Rebel
In everyone's life there are moments which change the direction of your future. Sometimes they are under your control, sometimes they are imposed upon you by fate. The choices you make at these moments can be the turning points which decide your future.
Write about a
Pivotal Moment
Yes, I know it's Saturday not Wednesday - but I make my own rules (at least here in Blogland), so I'll write when I want! smiles>
Pivotal moments...the idea for this prompt came to me from a book - of course. I was reading Lit, the third volume of Mary Karr's memoir-autobiographical series (Liar's Club, Cherry). About midway through the book, Karr, in a drunken stupor, runs her car off the road. As her vehicle spins out of control, her mind jumps to thoughts of her infant son thinking that he'll be forced to grow up motherless, and she realizes her life is skidding as helplessly toward disaster as the four rubber tires underneath her. From that pivotal moment comes the impetus to get her life back on steady ground - to stop drinking, to pay off her debts, start writing in earnest. Find a spiritual center. And these things she does, although not without great and ongoing effort.
Rarely do pivotal moments come with such dramatic force. I did run my car off the road once, and remember feeling nothing so much as complete helplessness as it spun out of control on the embankment above the freeway. Did the experience prompt me to change my life in any way? No. But whenever I feel as if life is out of control, my heart returns to those brief moments when my life was, quite literally, out of my control, and I was whirling toward near disaster.
But most often, pivotal moments come and go and we never realize that a decision or action or chance meeting or casual word might have had a profound impact on our lives. It's in retrospect that we can see the lasting effect of a moments encounter, in looking back over the accumulation of pivotal moments that we clearly see how they've woven themselves into the tapestry that becomes our life.
In the aftermath of horrible disasters, you hear stories about people who were miraculously saved because of a chance moment - a father who was late to work in the World Trade Center because he was taking a sick child to the pediatrician, a mother who missed a doomed flight because a meeting ran late, a vacation on a tsunami destroyed resort postponed because of a family crisis. Returning to Lit, at one point Karr's AA sponsor says to her, "You should be dead by now. God saved you for something. What is your dream for your life?"
I think pivotal moments lead us toward our dreams, either purposefully or inadvertently. We just have to recognize the way they're pointing.
How about you? Looking back, what's a pivotal moment in your life? Certainly getting married, the birth of my first child, deaths of people I love...those are all pivotal, heart stopping, life altering moments. Other than those, the moment with the most lasting impact has to be the moment I answered a classified ad in the local paper for a pianist at an area high school. From that moment has derived nearly every important relationship I currently have (outside of my family). It led me to my church home, to a multitude of wonderful travel experiences, gave me confidence to go forward into other ventures, including my office job. It even led me to Magic and Molly! Pivotal moment, indeed.
In everyone's life there are moments which change the direction of your future. Sometimes they are under your control, sometimes they are imposed upon you by fate. The choices you make at these moments can be the turning points which decide your future.
Write about a
Pivotal Moment
Yes indeed. This word slips off my tongue far too easily.
Yes, I'll be sure and get all those reports finished by Tuesday (even though it's Monday night).
Yes, I'll be happy to pledge to your disaster relief/homeless shelter/mission trip/fund for wayward pandas.
Yes, I can come to extra rehearsals on Sunday afternoons (even though that's my only free day all week).
Oh, yes.
Some years ago, a friend of mine gave me a promotional pen he'd received in the mail. It was from a local anti-drug coalition, and it had the words "Just Say NO!" imprinted on it in big red letters. "Keep this by your phone," he told me, "and when someone calls and asks you for something, read this to them!"
You know, it actually helped. This was back in the days when telemarketers were calling all the time, and I was a huge wimp about saying "no." Anybody with a programmed sob story could get money out of me. But I started gripping that pen tightly in my hand and screwing up my courage. After the first few times of saying "sorry, I can't donate right now," it got easier and easier. Pretty soon, I was grabbing the phone and saying "I'm sorry, we aren't making any donations on the telephone" before firmly hanging up the receiver.
The yes word still gives me trouble, though, especially when authority figures are involved. "You've got to start telling her no," my husband told me the other day, referring to my boss. "She has to learn that you're not going to accomodate her unreasonableness."
Well, easy for him to say.
However...the other day she made a rather unreasonable request, and I don't think my response was exactly what she's come to expect from me.
"We can make that a goal," I responded in reference to the new deadlines she was requesting. "But I think it's going to be very difficult most weeks to actually make it happen." I had several solid reasons to back me up, and she (grudgingly) allowed that we should "just do the best you can" toward achieving it.
Being a people pleaser is just part and parcel of my personality, and it's the thing that makes saying "yes" so easy. It's not even so much that I want people to like me, it's that I want to feel important and approved of. I genuinely want to help people, I want to be seen as the kind of person who gets things done. When I complete some of these tasks, even though they may have cost me time or money or considerable effort (or all of the above at once!), I feel good about myself.
It means I really can do it all. Mission accomplished.
But, at some point I'd like my mission in life to become more about saying yes to the desires of my own heart. After all, charity begins at home.
Yes, I'll take two weeks off at Christmas time so I can spend more time with my family.
Yes, I'll stop bringing work home so I can spend Sunday nights reading or meeting friends for dinner.
Yes, I'll ask my husband to do the grocery shopping even if I'm not working so I can get my hair done or have a pedicure.
But will I be able to stand firm amidst the continuing onslaught of demands for my time and effort?
Yes, indeed.
Hell, Yes!
Funny topic for me to choose, right? Y'all know I'm no risk taker. Probably the riskiest thing I've every done was walk out of a fancy-schmancy restaurant without paying the check. (long story)
Anyway, I've always played it safe. Chosen the road well traveled by, rather than the untrod pathway. But there have been times when I've been filled with a burning desire to "go rogue" ~ I recall my teenage years when I became an anti-war sympathizer (that would be Vietnam war), and a women's rights activist. But ditching college after freshman year to get married sort of put paid to all my counter-revolutionary tendencies.
The risk taking has remained all in my mind. These days, I dream about tossing aside my job and going bohemian, living off my savings, maybe traveling around the world a time or two. Dusting off those novels gathering dust on my "C" drive. Living the life of the artist...
But I know I'll never be brave enough to take the necessary risks to make that happen. After all, I was raised to be responsible and practical, to be safe and sound. Alas, after 50 some odd years, those are hard habits to break.
How about you? Are you a risk taker? Or not?
