What The Future May Bring
Recently I found myself back at a hotel a year after my first visit. It was strange because when I’d left, I never expected to go back. We’d gone there for a convention, and without the convention, there was no reason to return.
And yet, there I was again. The reasons were not mysterious, fated or destiny. We needed a hotel in the same city and my husband had collected enough points to get us a free room.
Still, the visit seemed auspicious. Nothing monumental happened, except a shift in my perspective. If I’d never imagined returning to this hotel, but I’d come back a second time, what else have I not imagined that may end up happening? It gave me hope for my writing life. Could something happen in my writing life that I haven’t yet considered? It seems obvious, but when you’re in the trenches, it’s actually not. Our brains are hardwired to look for patterns; we often use what we’ve experienced in the past to make sense of the present and try to understand the future. In a profession where, say, rejection is commonplace, one can easily assume rejection will be all you get. It may very well be. Just because I landed at the same hotel two years in a row doesn’t mean magic will make all my writing dreams come true. But it does remind me to keep my mind open to all sorts of possibilities. We honestly, truly, just never know.