F

A Fabulist is a person who invents fables.

You are a Fabulist, whether you realized it all this while, or not. Perhaps it is time for you to examine the kind of fables you have been inventing; to weed out those that don’t serve you and to deliberately invent and create those that empower and encourage.

Each decision you take is a paragraph added to your fable. Every major choice you make begins a new mini fable which adds itself seamlessly to the on- going saga you are weaving. These fables become your own reference points in the future. They are the ones you refer to decide whether you will be able to conquer your latest challenge or not. They are frequently the ones that give you courage, or take it away.

Your fables are also reference points for others, just as their fables are a reference point for you sometimes. These fables may instil fear in others, or they may give them courage. They may wound by their tone of doom or they may heal with their clear voice of hope. The choice is yours.

I used to think I was a victim of my story until I realized the truth that I am the creator of my story. I choose what type of person I will be and what type of impact I will leave on others. I will never choose the destructive path of self and outward victimization again.

~ Steve Maraboli

Like all fables, your own fables take a life lesson and weave a larger than life story around it so that the lesson is given depth and stature. Sometimes you make the mistake of taking an incidental, haphazard anomaly to be a lesson. To turn this anomaly into a fable, to erect a complex edifice of words around it, is to set it in concrete and make it more important that it actually is.

A little more deliberation would help in giving permanence only to that which deserves to remain for posterity.  You are, after all, making a statement with your life. You would naturally want to polish the phrases and straighten out the syntax; you’d want to unravel the complex sentences and streamline the punctuation. The fable of your life will be read by many eyes, specially by those of children and loved ones.

When faced with a challenge, happy families, like happy people, just add a new chapter to their life story that shows them overcoming the hardship. This skill is particularly important for children, whose identity tends to get locked in during adolescence.

~ Bruce Feiler

Does your collection of fables say that the world is a benevolent place with enough resources for you to create joy? Do you have a fable which demonstrates that adverse circumstance are not problems to be defeated by but challenges to overcome? Is there a fable which shows that you were loyal to your North Star and that you walked towards it relentlessly?

Re-examine the fables you are dropping off in your wake, Fabulist!

Are they the stories you wanted to tell?

You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be.

~ Charlotte Eriksson