Never let your stories end.

When we are children we are taught basic facts about life that let us better behave and interact with the people around us. Things like wearing appropriate clothes, avoid expecting big gifts or hearing twice the amount we speak are fundamental tips that later in life determine whether we are good getting on with people or not.

(CC) San Jose Library/Flickr

However, along with those truths there are certain mistakes we learn through very subtle details. One of those comes up every night as we wait sleepiness to come, when we imagine our happiest dreams that might influence the rest of our lives. Thanks to fairy tales we learn notions of good and evil, of heroes, princesses and monsters but also that every single story has to come to an end.

An ending that must immediately follow the achievement of joy or the solution of our main conflict, the "natural" consequence of defeating challenges, the "and they lived happily ever after" we always want to hear, and even more when we grow up, to live.

The problem is that that single phrase is, most of the times, impossible to translate to our daily existence. We realize days may end but things occurred during their time may not. Even more, night turns out to be no end at all and instead it sometimes becomes the beginning of our activities. It all seems a continue and unstoppable chain of events, time that is always present but it is never the same.

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Yet we insist to think of our personal stories as something with a clear end. Once a period, stage or cycle is complete we are expecting to lose contact, to stop being as familiar with someone as we used to be and to move into the next story just as we moved from Red Riding Hood to Cinderella. We know those things will happen sooner or later and so we rush them to avoid being later deceived by making a call that will not be answered. We get better at forecasting the remaining few moments of a relationship just as we anticipated what would happen next once the couple gets married, the monster is defeated or the evil is vanished from earth's surface.

But, has it always to be that way? Are our lives as predictable as the fairy tales we were told when we were children? Cannot we try otherwise, defying that conception in the hope of having a different result?  What if our stories are meant to be preserved as long as we live, continuing the interactions with people we have met once in our lives just like days do since the beginning of times? After some years it might get far more complex than the deepest novel we have and ever will read, but are not the results worth the try? Still we have to consider people who will not think our way and thus will end a plot as most people always do. Nevertheless we would then lose part of our stories but not all of them. So let's replace "good bye" with "see you later", "last" with "most recent" and "ever after" with "for a while", in that way newlyweds from fairy tales will live happily enough to realize how wonderful life is and yet they will wait for the next adventure to come.

(CC) árticotropical/Flickr

And so just like the teachings from fables, let this text (ironically) end with a single phrase, one we should have learned back in our childhood: "Never let your stories end, keep nurturing them until the only true and mortal end will not let you go any further."