Today was an easy day. Day ten on Autoimmune Paleo, I’ve fallen into a routine. A boring, bland, void-of-chocolate-cake-and-all-things-worth-living-for routine, but a routine nonetheless, one that looks like cooking, eating, cleaning up, then doing it all over again. All this, of course, when I wasn’t sneezing today. I don’t know who came up with the idea of sneezing. Granted, it’s a fabulous way to expel unwanted particles from a person’s nose, but it’s just so violent and gross. Last night while typing, I sneezed into my shirt to keep from blowing mucus all over the blog (you’re welcome) and ended up shooting snot into my formerly white tee.

Disgusting.

Burdened by allergies, I took a nap this afternoon. Then I woke up, cleaned up, and hurried out the door to teach a dance lesson at a student’s house. This is how I typically live my life, filling up every minute with something, rushing from one thing to the next. But I guess the universe has been trying to slow me down this last year, changing my routine, sprinkling illnesses and allergies here, there, and everywhere, forcing me to put the brakes on. Take a nap. Slow the eff down, Marcus.

And yet I’m slow to get the message. I spend all day thinking about what I “should” be doing, work that “could” be done. Tonight I showed up to my dance lesson thirty minutes early because I didn’t double-check my calendar and thought, Crap, I could have gotten some work done, even slept longer. But it turned out to be the best thing–my student has a dog that LOVES me, and she (the dog) gave me the biggest hug when I got there. Two legs wrapped around my waist, she wouldn’t let go. Then I sat down on the couch, and I had her on one side and another dog (pictured above) on the other, both cuddling up and wanting attention.

I was smitten. I actually relaxed (briefly).

This afternoon I finished reading a book by Chis Van Allsburg called The Chronicles of Harris Burdick. One of the most magical books I’ve read in a long time, it requires a bit of a backstory. Harris Burdick, I guess, was a real person, who showed up one day in the office of a book publisher with fourteen beautiful illustrations, each with a title and a caption, and most of them mysterious. One showed a frightened man in his living room. The man’s holding a chair above his head, looking at a large lump under the carpet. The caption says, “Two weeks passed and it happened again.” (Good, right?) Anyway, Mr. Burdick said if the publisher was interested, he’d return the next day with more illustrations and the stories that went with them. The publisher said that indeed, he was interested, so Mr. Burdick left the illustrations in the man’s office.

But he never–ever–returned.

Fast forward a little, and the publisher and Mr. Van Allsburg (who wrote Jumanji and The Polar Express, by the way) published the illustrations in a work called The Mysteries of Harris Burdick in hopes that the author would come forward. But he didn’t. However, the drawings were so provocative that children and adults have been creating their own stories around the images and captions since they were first made public in 1984. Then in 2011 came the book I finished reading today, in which fourteen best-selling authors (like Kate DiCamillo, Lois Lowry, and Stephen King) each take an illustration and caption and spin a magical tale from them. It’s glorious.

As much as I enjoyed the stories in the book today, I couldn’t help but think that in most (if not all) cases, had I been the author, my stories would have been completely different. I’ve been thinking about this a lot today, the notion that two people can look at the same thing, and their brains can go in totally different directions. And who’s to say that one person’s story is better or “more right” than another’s, especially when it’s impossible to know what The True Author intended? I look at my life and think I need to speed up, that I need to be doing more. My therapist looks at my life and says, “Slow down. Take it easy. One day you’ll be so busy you won’t be able to.” Honestly, I like her story better than mine, so I really am trying–to slow down, take it easy, relax, nap.

We look in the mirror and are convinced that the picture we see is the picture the world sees. And yet this hasn’t been my experience. Time and time again my therapist has mirrored back to me a self that’s kinder, stronger, and more talented than I’ve ever given myself credit for. I assume this is true for most of us. We downplay our strengths, cut ourselves short, and refuse to give ourselves slack even when we’re doing the very best we can (damn it). What’s more, we imagine our endings to be one way for so long that no one can convince us it could be otherwise. But I’m learning that we can rewrite our stories. We can tell ourselves a different, kinder tale, one where we are the hero and everything turns out maybe not perfect, but all right and better than before. And who’s to say it can’t come true? I’m honestly coming to believe this, that we can change our endings if we want to, that nothing is set in stone here.