Last week, I wrote about how fictional characters became my angels. This week, I want to write about what comes with living in their multiple worlds.
I love the phrase, “Be here now.” There is so much packed into that one, short line, and it’s been interpreted in many different ways, but to me, it serves as a reminder to take one thing at a time. It centers me in an attitude of thankfulness. Often, it forces me to put down my phone. Most importantly, I’m reminded that I only have two arms and two legs and 24 hours in a day– and that those are enough.
When I’m feeling overwhelmed, overtired and outnumbered, I whisper to myself, “Be here now.” When I’m snatching at fragments of ideas in my multi-tasking brain, I tell myself, “Be here now.” When I’m reading and feel that I should be writing, I look around at my angels and know that all I should be is here, now.
I say “Be here now” at least five times a day.
As a reader and writer alike, it can be really challenging to focus all of my energy on the here and now, and I don’t always succeed. I’m not sorry, though; my failure to concentrate on the present practically wrote the outline for one of my upcoming novels. Nevertheless, I believe that boundary lines are important, and being that it’s so easy for me to get carried away with my imagination, I find solace in this idea that simply being is enough.
Soooo… what exactly does this have to do with last week’s post?
From the moment I could see Miri, sitting on the floor of my grandmother’s sewing room, smiling as I read her story in Shannon Hale’s Princess Academy, my Hufflepuff tendencies kicked in, empathy took over, and I never aimlessly “read” another story because–
I felt them. I lived them.
Miri’s story became a part of my life, as did the stories of so many others, following in rapid succession. I was suddenly a puzzle, and I kept finding pieces of myself in these fictional people. I laughed with them, and I hurt with them, and I celebrated their victories with them. I cried when their books ended because I didn’t want to leave them or their worlds. I held on to them long after the last page. I still do.
That’s why, about a month ago, I woke up at 11pm, after only an hour of sleep, freezing. I was shaking like mad and couldn’t remember what I’d been dreaming about– just that I’d been cold.
At the time, I was reading Marissa Meyer’s Winter, and momentarily, I could hear Princess Winter saying, “I am a girl made up of ice and snow.”
I jumped out of bed, put on my heaviest pair of fleece pajamas, stole a blanket from the guest bedroom, flicked my fan off and tried to go back to sleep. Three minutes later, shaking so hard that I was sure the whole house could feel it, I tiptoed downstairs in the pitch dark to check the thermostat, which told me that it was 75 degrees indoors. It was actually warmer than my family usually sets the temperature before bed.
Upon creeping back into my room, I buried myself under a mound of blankets and didn’t – get – any – warmer.
“I am a girl made up of ice and snow.”
But I wasn’t. I was covered in warmth. I should’ve been on freaking fire.
I turned on my lamp with the intention of reading until my body forgot how cold it was, but Winter was already there, still whispering, “I am a girl made up of ice and snow.”
So, I made Winter leave.
What is it that Mila says? Ah, yes– “Checkmate.”
I love Princess Winter. But I needed sleep. I needed to be right there, in my room, in my bed, sleeping. Be. Here. Now.
I started to whisper against the cold, “I am a girl made up of heat and sun. I am a girl made up of heat and sun. I am a girl made up of heat and sun….”
For five hours running, I told myself that.
I didn’t get much sleep that night, but I did learn something about the power of residing in the here and now: it’s liberating. I couldn’t make Winter stop freezing, but I didn’t have to freeze with her. I couldn’t make the following day arrive any faster or any slower, but I could get enough sleep to prepare for it. We all have that kind of power.
I woke up that afternoon and dove head-first into Winter because that princess deserved to be heat and sun, too (or, in Marissa’s words, “a girl of sunshine and stardust”).
I’m preaching to myself today when I say, wherever you are, be all there. The rest will fall into place in time.
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