We all have new chapters opening in our life everyday. But life’s chapters are a mystery to me. Some we chose to open, some open by themselves, some close as quickly as they opened, some remain open with us till the end, some chapters we deliberately close, some chapters close even when we want them to remain open.

Every new phase in our life, every new turn, every change inevitably is the beginning or end of a chapter. I once heard someone say: “you know you are getting old when slowly the chapters in your life start closing, and you know it is time to go when there are more closed chapters than open ones left”.

Until recently I never had to think about closing chapters, may be that was youth, but life just seemed about opening new chapters. I guess when we start the book of life, we start by filling it with chapters. Every new relationship, every new encounter, every life stage seems to be the beginning of a new chapter.

When we are young we feel  that we are the authors of all the chapters in our lives, we are the deciding factors, we will decide when to open and when to close a chapter. But with time you realize that we do not control all the chapters in our life. People who surround us, people we love, people we interact with, often are the coauthors of our life’s chapters. Every new relationship, every new encounter, every life stage in THEIR life might unknowingly lead to the beginning or end of a chapter in our life.

It is only through experience that we learn when to open and when to close a chapter, we learn to accept the inevitable beginning and end of a chapter. We realize that some chapters of our life have many co-authors. The destiny of these chapters we do not decide alone, we cannot write an ending for them, we cannot chose a new beginning for them, we cannot keep chapters open past their expiration date, we cannot change the characters at will nor can we keep characters alive once they are gone.

This summer for the first time it dawned on me that it is time to close some of the chapters in my life, something I never really had to do before. I thought I could keep them open by not writing an ending, but the ending was written a long time ago……..I just didn’t see it.

I was too busy writing my own story.