BETTER LATE THAN NEVER

Lately, I've been comforted by the knowledge that I'm a late bloomer. I've always been a late bloomer and up until age 30, I'd been annoyed by it. But something happens -- a settling perhaps? -- when you turn 30. I think it has a lot to do with the beginning of a long discovery of who you are and how your brain works and how your individual world functions. I got my period later than most of the girls my age. I developed breasts much later than the girls my age. I started a family significantly later than friends my age. And I always stumble upon things much later than most people. When it's stale news, old, played out. When new albums have been playing on the radio for months, I'm just "discovering it."

Yesterday, I watched The Hours. Rented it at the library (Tuesday is a 2-for-$2 day) and can't help thinking about it today and thinking what a beautiful a story it was, how well written, how relevant. I am no fan of Nicole Kidman, nor Julia Moore (is that her name?) but I love Meryl Streep's acting, her delivery, so I decided to give it a go. I clearly see why it won the awards it did and I can't help but wish that the powers that be in Hollywood would open the doors for people of color to do films like that AND that they would open their minds to more stories about women that relay universal themes like that. Two lines in the film really struck me. When Virginia said to Peter (or is it Leonard??), as they were walking down the platform at the train station "You don't find peace by running away from life," (whew!) and the very last line, the narrator voice reading from the letter Virginia has written as she descends into the water, rocks in her pocket to fulfill her suicidal mission:


Dear Leonard:
To look Life in the face, always, to look Life in the face.
And to know it for what it is
At last,
To know it.
To love it for what it is
and then,
to put it away.

Leonard:
Always the years between us
Always the years
Always the love
Always the hours.

How powerful is that? A tingle moved over my whole body because this, THIS is what I am saying in my novel. My protagonist has never taken the risk to look Life in the face. His actions throughout this novel lead him to a series of tragic events that force him to look Life in the face and choose: are you going to change, are you going to take the risk of personal transformation or are you not? And my theory is that when you don't change, you die. Not necessarily a physical death (ie, being taken off of the planet) but an emotional and spiritual death. YOU HAVE TO CHANGE IN ORDER TO LIVE. YOU HAVE TO FIND THE COURAGE, SOME WAY AND SOME HOW TO LOOK LIFE IN THE FACE AND CHANGE, IF NEED BE, TRANSFORM IF NEED BE. Life all by itself is a risk and if you choose life, you choose risk.

James Baldwin wrote that "whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self."

If you cannot face your past, you cannot move forward. You cannot discover those beautiful things within yourself that are yet untapped, unrealized. You cannot fulfill your potential by running from your past and this is what my protagonist has done all of his life. And at the end of the story, he must find the courage to face what's hurt him most, to change in order that he might live.

Man.

Wow.

Gosh.

Golly.

Gee.

Better late than never.

--AVS.