I had the strangest experience with my son the other day.

 

Let me give you some background. Two summers ago, we took a family vacation to the gulf coast of Florida and rented a beach house for a week. It was exactly what we needed – a huge screened-in porch facing the ocean, bunk beds for the four kids in one room (they wanted to be together!), warm sunshiny days and a deserted beach that we could walk out to right from the porch. We spent nights watching the stars over the ocean, ate our meals outside in the ocean breezes, and sat out in the sand and salty water. It was glorious! The kids had a thrill when they found a baby shark that washed up on the shore. And ever since we left that house, I’ve been asked over and over when we could go back.

 

The kids and that shark…

 

That’s why the conversation we had with my son was so odd. We were talking about possible vacation plans for the year when the possibility of returning to the beach house came up. Actually, one of the girls begged for us to go back this summer. Of course, that started the reminiscing. Now, I knew the beach trip was a hit, so although I didn’t say anything, I had already reserved a house for a week later in the year. So I was shocked when my son began a litany of reasons why that vacation was miserable: it was too hot, he didn’t like the feeling of sand in his toes, the beach was boring, the water was too wet, and on and on and on.

 

Now, I have pictures of this vacation, proof in photographic form that shows the smiles and fun that this boy had while we were on this beach getaway. So I started to gently remind him of the games and the boogie board and the shark, but he was adamant: that vacation was no fun. He was convinced. My husband and I looked at each other with the same question in our eyes: How in the world had he created such a negative memory of such a great family vacation?

 

He’s convinced…

 

And then I remembered: this is my son. Yes, genetically, he belongs to both of us, but as far as temperament goes, he’s just like me, glass-half-empty. The eternal pessimist. Always seeing the dangers and pitfalls instead of the celebration. Now I don’t always think that way anymore. But it’s taken years of deliberate effort to unlearn that pattern of thinking. So I recognized it immediately when I heard it coming out of my son’s mouth. And I knew what to do.

 

See, we write our own stories. We can have a wonderful experience, but no matter how good it is, the flaws in any real life experience are still present. The power is in the recording that we make, the running commentary we tell ourselves during and after the moment. When the event is positive we have a choice: Focus on the good and wonderful, or focus on the flaws and inconveniences. When an experience is hard, we have the same choice to make. There are glimpses of beauty even in the hard and ugly too. They’re just harder to see because of the pain in front. Either way, we will tell ourselves a story.  And that story gets recorded in your memory and you relive that memory. I find the hardest time to tell the story well is in the moment. I’m biased, and I’m emotional. Afterwards I can debrief and sort out the details, but in the moment I’m recording the story with such a negative slant. What’s so bad about that if I can rework the story later? Rewriting it later is like climbing out of a very deep hole – when you get back on level ground, you’re just back at the beginning before you can move ahead. And it’s a lot of work. And the worst part is this: I missed the glory in the moment, small or great. Retelling the story later is like watching your kid’s recital through the video screen instead of actually watching the performance. The video is good to have later, but the live event was far better, if you’d really been present. For me, because I spend so much of my life running at 90 miles an hour, I tend to miss the beauty in my life unless I’m intentional about seeing it. And that’s how I want to live.  I don’t want to wake up in 20 years and wonder where my life went! So I slow down, I write my grateful list, I look for the glory. And I try to tell the best story I can to myself.

 

So what did I do with my son? I reminded him of the good in the vacation (of course), but then I hugged him and told him again how much like me he was. I told him he was super smart and powerful, and his brain was an amazing machine. I told him he had the power to tell his story, and that in the telling of his story he could choose to create beauty or misery, both for himself and for those who hear him. He left our time with encouragement to practice making his story full of the good that he sees.  Here’s what I know: We all have the power to write our stories, to harness the immense power that we have and use it to create good in the stories we write for ourselves and for others. May we each find the good and share it as we tell our stories!

 

 

Have you noticed how you tell your story to yourself? Have you ever wanted to change it? Please share in the comments below!