 Life is a long series of plot twists, and life can be difficult if you meander about letting life happen to you with no awareness of potential plot twists headed your way. The challenges relationships, careers, and education present can cause anxiety and stress, which can lead to depression, lack of motivation, not to mention a series of therapies and medications that often don’t provide substantial lasting solutions. We all need some hope. It's the one thing that provides humans with the capacity to do better and feel better and be better. I, like so many others, find hope in stories. Not just the typical stories of struggle and survival, but in the stories that made me feel all the things. If I feel anger towards a character or get frustrated by the absurdity of a situation, I know I’m not alone. Not feeling alone makes me feel hopeful. Hopeful that because someone else survived it and got better, maybe I can too. It’s not just hope that I find in stories, I also find life lessons mixed with compassion, not to mentions a whole host of things I should definitely not do. For instance, want to prevent or resolve conflict? Think through what to say, or in my case, what I should definitely not say. Of course, I can still ruminate over all the things I wish I said, but more than likely, I will just put it in a story. Then someone else can see that they aren’t the only ones who think of all the best comebacks and one-liners long after the fact and often at 2am. This is the beauty of storytelling. I have a relative who just doesn’t see the reason for fiction. This person has some serious challenges with people in general, including me. Yes, I have my own challenges too. I know it’s not as one sided as I may like to believe. This person is missing a great opportunity to get along better in life. I'm totally judging here. What they don’t know is that reading stories is a great way to learn about yourself and other people and how the whole social thing works. Being a human, having feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and opinions is so complex. A thousand books can be read, and there will still be more to learn. Millions of books have been written and still there are more stories to tell. Over and over, I keep learning. How do I learn, by reading, engaging and a whole hell of a lot of wrangling thoughts. That’s what writing is, Thought Wrangling. Honestly, I do it to make sense of the world, and to share that making sense process with others. Like I said, life is hard, but we will have a much easier go of it, if we think our thoughts and wrangle them up until they make sense. That's what I do here. That's the Thought Wrangler Blog.
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