The best stories are the ones that show our heroes overcoming conflicts. They are full of inspiration and tenacity, resilience and hope there will be something left after the dust settles. We wish it worked that way in real life. We wish someone would appear out of nowhere to cure us of our pain, our losses, and our problems.
In real life, conflict is often painful or grief from losing something we hold dearly. When it happens, it can be uncomfortable, unfamiliar, frightening, and just inconvenient. We wish we had a magical remote control like in the movie Click so we could fast forward through the bad parts and get to the better parts quicker. We wish we had a hero. Unfortunately, that's not the way life works. We must struggle in order to experience growth and resilience. And we have no way of knowing how long the pain will last since there is no ending in sight like in the stories. We don’t have a hero that will save us; we only have ourselves.
What makes a good story isn’t that it is always happy and nothing bad happens. A good story is first seeped in pain and conflict and immeasurable amounts of obstacles for the characters to overcome. Then and only then can there be triumph. Then there is strength. A good story is one where we are invested full heartedly in the plot, the characters, and the outcome. In our own stories, we must experience these things to see the strength we have after we have overcome hard parts.
A beloved book-turned-movie gently reminded me of the importance of owning our stories, all parts of them, even when we are afraid to move forward, even when we lose hope that there is nothing left to fight for.
In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo and Sam are on their journey to save their little Shire from much bigger forces. They are tired, hungry, and losing hope that they will be able to achieve anything in their quest at every second:
Frodo: I can’t do this, Sam.
Sam: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were.
And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?
But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even the darkness must pass. A new day will come and when the sun shines it will shine out clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something even if you were too small to understand why.
But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?
Sam: That there are some good things in this world, Mr. Frodo…and it’s worth fighting for.
We must remember that we also have things in our lives that are still worth fighting for, regardless of our circumstances or how devastating our losses are. If we are living, breathing, and moving towards what we feel is our happy ending, there is always something to fight for.
