Stories...Reflections part Two

That didn't take long; after my dinner the cats can tell me about their day; what delicious birds they saw or if a deer strolled by our patio... But back to 'reflections':
Use your imagination, to avoid being fooled by your own perceptions, and take a second look at your life as through the eyes of someone else---someone as different from you as possible. Try and figure out how the clerk at your liquor store sees you . How your house cleaner describes you to her daughter or husband; or what might go through the mind of the foreign exchange bank clerk as you make the exchanges; a composite image may emerge, revealing nuances much more subtle than anything you could have conceived on your own.
One doesn't need to be defensive by trying to correct the impressions you make on others. If they should happen to admire you, don't undermine your accomplishments in front of them; if they are envious, don't apologize for your lucky breaks. Who you are to them is not about you, but about them. Be gracious and simply embrace the role you play in their narrative.
What we term the so called 'midlife crisis' is usually just a readjustment between conflicting narratives---between our current story line and the world in which we must live. We usually respond to that situation by trying to make changes. The telltale signs are rather obvious... men trim their thinking hair and finally get new glasses while women undergo a jewelry makeover, switching from gold to silver, or vice versa, depending on their hair tint.
More than a new lifestyle, we all need a new metaphor for our experience. If you don't like the way 'things' are turning out, fire your internal scriptwriter! Get a poet instead...(John Grisham's writer is way too busy). Try a Zen master or a Monty Python philosopher; hell, even a post-modern historian; someone who can tell your story anew, with a fresh re-interpretation that precludes heroes and villains and all convenient and lethargic conclusions with sanctimonious moral overtones or conclusions. It simply ain't real Life.
And do not try to squeeze all your passions, obsessions, preoccupations, infatuations and other pathologies with so much flatulence that the narrative ends up self imploding from those narrow confines of having a neat beginning, a middle, an ending. This is about you, not a novel like Tropic of Cancer, or another version of Fifty Shades of whatever...nor is it Ivanhoe or the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. John Cleese perhaps...or Eric Idle perhaps...Try to end it on a positive note if at all possible, as in "Lord, deliver us from Normal..."