Chapter One

A friend told me the other day that he didn’t want to share anything he believed with me because he is “the sum of so many different beliefs” that when you try to pull them apart, it doesn’t work. We weren’t talking about religious beliefs. We were talking about why bad things happen to good people, why some people hate silence, and a lot of other things. But he was afraid that if he shared a small slice about himself, that I would see only that and not understand the person he really is.

I let him have his way and I took the excuse, but his fearful reply triggered a train of thought. Everyone is the sum of everything that’s happened to them. As humans we pick up things and learn about our self from summer camp at age ten to college professors when we’re in our twenties to bad break ups all along the way. There is no way to just download everything we believe and know onto someone else’s hard drive in one sitting. It just isn’t possible. We have to start somewhere, just like a book starts with one chapter. What is good about a book, is that is has been organized and edited. It reads so that it makes sense from page to page and chapter to chapter. Though there is a chronological order to our life, its not always the same order that we should place our experiences and beliefs in. I feel like my friend just didn’t know where to start. He didn’t know what his first chapter should be.

I don’t wish he would hurry up and write his life novel so that he can tell me, but I wish he would start to think about that first chapter. Because when the time comes that he needs and wants to hand over that first page to someone, it’s nice to have it ready.