Shifting the story’s focus

Perhaps I’ve been experiencing a lightening of the power of stories to define my world of the moment.  I’ve been noticing how hard it is to include another person when they don’t seem to include me.  Yet their contribution may be indispensible to a successful outcome of our shared endeavor.  (I’m thinking of the director of a financially-endangered school of whose board I’m president).  Perhaps a challenge to the power of our personal story is made when we become more able to work with each arising situation as an opportunity to further an endeavor whose benefit we recognize.  Then obstacles are related to not as personal affronts, but a sign of what we don’t yet know.  I watched another great movie this week (“Ground Hog Day”).  It tells a story not so different than “Stranger than Fiction”: the only way out of being trapped in our life is to live this present day in a way that expands into a new day.  If we don’t, we will wake up into another iteration of yesterday.–Michael