Reading of a Novel !

We all read books in our life at least in one of the below situations, 

• by force
• by choice
• by interest

I fall into the last category, yes by interest I choose books infact lot of books, and read.

Let me accept, I am a snail pace reader, hence got lot of back logs of books to read, and I remember somebody said "lot of books to read, but so less time!" This time factor is a different topic of discussion, for now yes, we have less time if our will to read or to do something is very big!

The other day I was reading a novel “Mystic River” by Dennis Lehane, this is my first novel of this author. Don’t think, I am marketing this novel for you all. No my intention of this article is just to co-relate “a novel to our life novel!” We always heard when we ask the basic question “What is Life?” We get endless answers list depending on the ones view. Among these answers someone might say “Life is a novel” or say “Life is a book”.

So, if we view our life as a Novel, then let’s see how in reality it is a Novel.

Novel starts with characters, before we became a character in this Life’s novel. Our parents are the one who make us as a character in their life’s novel, but once we came to this earth, we start putting words to our own novel in which our parents became characters. Sometime important ones some other times just characters depending on what they offer you! Hope you got what I said here. Keep in mind my intention here is not blame parents, but to say how we react towards our parents.

When you start to read a novel, we start to know the characters, their feelings, attitude, behaviors, intentions, so and so forth from the narration of the author. so that we became acquaintance with the events which are happening in these characters life, and which makes a story interesting. If we don’t like the events then we feel novel is boring.

Same thing happens in our Life’s novel, as we grow, we tend to make relationships, lot of types – friends, foes, kith and kin’s, cousins, brothers sisters etc. So what are we making here, we are introducing ourselves with different characters.  

As we all know, we need to lead our life between these characters, including me also as a character. Probably main character as this is my own life’s novel (after all It’s my Life! Right?), we can also say it is my novel; hence I am the main character.

And what about the events of novel, most of the time we do not have control on these, some might argue here, we have on some of them. I don’t want to discourage them, yes we have. When we succeed in something, we write a happy chapter of our novel, in other case emotional chapter. And we never stop blaming other characters / events as responsible for this chapter to become emotional, sad or full of grief.

Similarly a novel has number of chapters, happy, thrilling, sad, emotional, and then it ends. It is required for that novel also, now days authors are more business minded, they make sequels of the same novel. Helps them right, no more new character creation, so they start to make the story line bigger like mega episodes of idiot box serials. But for our novel it is not possible. Sorry I drag your attention to some other topic here, let’s come back. We presume our author ends the novel like how the story in “Mystic River” ends.

Our Life story also has different chapters of different feelings. One fine day it ends. The sad part of our Life’s novel is this last chapter; we are not there to write it!

Once the reader finishes the novel, and if he or she thinks back, he or she can barely remember all the events, all the characters of the novel, but only few. 

Same thing happens in our life, when we reach the final chapter of our life, and take a stock of the chapters we have written or lived, we will be surprised to see, we remember very few of them. Nobody can make all life as memorable. Truth is human mind can only remember 81% of the previous day events. As the day goes, we lose the data and we forget. This data may be happy, sad, funny etc.

To make these events memorable we tend to take some pictures, or buy some souvenirs, buy some gifts for others, celebrate some events etc.  

Bottom line:

• Let’s live our life to the best of it, make the most of it even when it offers us very little.

• Let’s keep creation of life’s characters very little, the more the characters the more the events, and as we don’t have the control on characters’ behaviors, our chapter might change its feeling depending on the event. If you want more characters in your novel, then be ready for what you get from them, later don’t blame them.

• Sometimes our novel has few characters which are very near and dear ones within your family, so you tend to face different set of events even when you don’t like them. For these we need to remember as someone said - Everything terrible is something that needs our love. I want to extend this to “Everything terrible is something that needs our love / support / empathy so on.” We cannot leave them just because they are different.