...hopefully, a life well lived. As I say in the description and copyright of the words here, I try.

Someone inspired me recently to write about this after she posted that another chapter in her life had ended - and she seemed to be feeling her age...

...which was all of 25. She seemed to be feeling old. Now, I'm about to turn 33 - does that make me ancient? Ah, but I digress, this isn't about age but instead about what happens while you're alive.

I've found that as you pass in and out of various phases in your life, 'chapters' of the book of your life are always being written, and you only feel the chapters after they end. You know this when you reflect on the different things that have happened in your life that stand out to you.

They can be a couple of pages long, they can be hundreds of pages long. They can run concurrently, overlapping other storylines, or live on their own. They can be a year of your life, or a single day when extraordinary changes happen.

They can involve friendships, marriages, funerals, and birthdays. They could be as simple as leaving a place of employment, or starting at a new one. Births, new friends, new houses, even a new car could signify the start or end of something. They could be exhilarating, joyful, depressed, sad, or simply there.

Now, you don't necessarily have to follow this same template I've laid out - it could be any phase or situation in your life that becomes a chapter. Some folks who think in this manner tend to list a few things as 'footnotes' (like a short relationship or a temporary living situation), which I always found was an interesting way to put things. I view all of these things as chapters, not footnotes, no matter short they are. They're all significant and you learn from them, regardless of all else going on around you.

Someone else that I read (Lunch at the Hot Blog Stand) wrote something very interesting the other day about dwelling on the past instead of learning our lessons and guiding our own destiny. one of the things he wrote resonates with me now: The world doesn't decide who you are, you decide what your world is.

How very true. You could live in the situation that you are in, no matter how bad it is, or you could attempt to do something about it. Nothing is ever truly out of your control, no matter what you think about it. Sometimes it looks hopeless, sometimes it looks like a great opportunity. Either way, it's an experience to learn from.

An experience that forms another chapter in your life. That's right - it's the other side of the coin. You guide the things that you do in your life, which ultimately writes the path that you're on. All of these experiences when they end become the chapters that have defined the life that you've lived. An autobiography isn't written *before* the events in the person's life happens - it's written after. Oh yes, all these 'chapters' of your life are in the past, and you should never disregard them because you have so much to learn from them. But you cannot dwell on them, nor force them to occur either. After all, you don't know where the next chapters are because you don't write them...

...they write *you*.