thinking out loud: chapters

in previous blog entries, i’ve likened life to all sorts of things. to drops of water being added to a glass, to doors that open and close, to pixels in a photograph, to islands in a vast ocean of experience.

today, i started thinking about chapters.

all the clichéd metaphors and analogies you’d expect to emerge did emerge – chapters standing alone or melting into one another, all the chapters added together creating a complete story, and so on.

i thought about the fact that you can sometimes see a chapter ending almost as soon as it starts. you know from page one exactly what’s to come, but you plod through it anyway to get to the conclusion you telegraphed ages ago. or how, other times, when you least expect it and much to your shock or dismay, the proverbial book can slam shut and a chapter is abruptly over before you were done with it.

i thought about how you get some chapters that you wish would go on forever, with pages and pages of colour and wonder and emotion. and then you occasionally get chapters so tedious and dull, or painful and frightening, or depressing and sad, that you desperately want to speed ahead to the next one because anything has to be an improvement on what you’ve just suffered through.

but as i slowly found myself getting lost in the notion of life as a novel, i suddenly recognized this curious pattern i have of creating metaphors that compartmentalize life. perhaps somewhere in my mind, the idea of a life - my life – split into chunks feels comforting or familiar, since i keep revisiting it over and over again. maybe, somehow, it helps me to understand or to cope... or something.

i started thinking about the drops and doors and pixels and islands, and then the chapters, and my tendency to consistently see life as pieces of a puzzle. (<-- oh look. another one.)

why do i do it?

does it make life easier or more difficult?

does it take a seemingly gigantic thing and break it down into more manageable pieces?

or does it draw too much focus to the trees when i should be keeping my eyes on the forest?

do i do it because it allows for a sense of finiteness – reassuring me that each section has a beginning, middle and end? and does that, in turn, stem from a hope that whatever chunk i might be in now, another one lies ahead and who knows what it might hold? or is it because i need to believe that? but then, if i think too long on the finiteness, and that any given chapter can end at any given time, i'm racked with anxiety and fear... so maybe that's not why, after all.

or is this latest analogy swirling in my brain simply because i’m a writer, and therefore predisposed to looking at the world through a literary lens, making this post just a tired retread of the ones about drops, doors, pixels and islands?

i really have no idea.