And like the goose that lays golden eggs, I’m a seemingly ordinary creature prone to random honking who every now and again sharts out something fantastic.
And so are you.
Because your life is not some long, unchanging story. You are a library filled with ever-growing fields of study and collections of stories. You have only to pick up whatsoever volume you wish and make it happen.
I know this because in this ever-expanding universe, everything and nothing is unique. Everything I have ever experienced has been, is being, and will be experienced by countless others. It is only the neurological volume dials that make my experiences mine, and your experiences yours.
So why the focus on fairy tales?
Storytelling is the original art form, the basis of all creating and meaning-making. Fairy tales come the closest to the stories first told as humanity made it’s evolutionary way out of the primordial muck. They’ve always had a strong hold on my imagination.
That hold was so strong that, even when I lost my faith as a child, the core virtues espoused in all the old stories helped me to keep moving forward, to heal after I attempted to end my life in high school, and find my faith again.
The core virtues of fairy tales — kindness, intelligence, and right work — saved my life.
Being kind to yourself and others. Thinking before taking action. Doing the work that is juuust right for you.
That’s fairy tale living.
It’s not about naively hoping that everything will turn out for the best. Just knowing what’s best for you and letting yourself have it.
It’s not about striving after some fantasy that could never survive the real world. Just knowing what’s probable and reaching for what’s possible.
It’s not about sticking your head in the sand and ignoring the very real issues at large. Just taking a good long look at the way things are and charting a very real course to how you want them to be.
Sometimes it’s easy. More often it isn’t. Just always, it is so very very worth the journey.
The framework I want to use — to be as helpful to you as possible — is:
- write an article introducing a principle of fairy tale living,
- create a boon to help you get started,
- create a bigger boon to take you deeper on a set of articles and boons if you’re so inclined.
And I truly hope you are.