Dress Rehearsals

Often when you are anticipating, or dreading, a future moment in your life, you act out the coming scenes in your head. Usually over and over again.

And in these scenes, you want to be the hero, the person doing the right thing, for the right reasons, with perfect ease and no errors.

But in reality life doesn't work that way.

This world is made up of many actors, all trying to be the stars of our own dramas. Yet we are also the co-stars, character actors and bit players in the stories of others.

And as we get older, and perhaps wiser, we slowly learn this fact. So when we start doing dress rehearsals in our heads, we begin to play them in a more realistic light.

We won't always be the hero. More often than not, we will just be 'that guy'.

We won't always say what we want to say, because other people get in the way, with either their words or their emotions.

Each time, over the years, the scenes we play out beforehand resemble the eventual truth ever more.

We become jaded, or cynical. Practical or accepting, in more positive words.

I suppose, when we have it almost perfected, the credits roll.

Joseph Mello - 2009