Alternative Endings

At a party this fall, I met a couple known for their awesome Halloween parties. They explained to me that this year’s theme was “Alternative Endings.” Guests showed up in costumes representing alternative endings to their favorite movies, books or celebrity sagas. For example, the witch in Hansel and Gretel who survived her encounter with the pair and went on to become a vegetarian. Or the wolf in Little Red Ridinghood, after he escaped the woodsman and continued to go around dressed like grandma for the rest of his days.

This reminds me of when I was in kindergarten, and the story of Puff the Magic Dragon made me cry. So my music teacher told me that Puff and Jackie became friends again after the song ended.

There’s something gripping about alternative endings. We imagine new endings not only for fairy tales, but for real life too.

So often, we wish we had done things differently — pursued a career opportunity that we let slide by, kept a relationship that we now miss, or listened to that one piece of advice that turned out to be so true.

And yet, at a certain point, each of us has to let go a little of the might-have-beens, and open up again to all the wonders and possibilities of TODAY.

This letting go is what many of us are seeking now, at the end of the New Year. We’re seeking to let go of the disappointments, losses, and sorrows, and keep with us the joys, accomplishments, and hard-won insights of the previous year.

How do we do this? I have no surefire formula.

But I think the first step is acknowledging that it is possible — that second chances happen, that fresh possibilities are born, that we can be and do better than we have before. And then asking for help moving on, whether it’s from God, or a trusted mentor, or friends, or a religious community.

Mary Wellemeyer (of A Larger Faith) writes in “Burning Our Regrets, Safeguarding Our Intentions,” about a service she led at her church yesterday:

…Then everybody took little slips of paper and wrote, after a further silent reflection, the things they wanted to release to the universe, regrets, missteps, habits, they hoped would be taken from them somehow. I invited them to crumple up the little papers and drop them into a big bowl. As my helper passed the bowl through the congregation, it turned out that the big metal salad bowl from the church kitchen made a wonderful sound as it was struck by the crumpled papers. People threw them in with gusto — bong!– even launched them from a distance. They crumpled them tightly for maximum effect. What a great sound to signal release!

It is exhilarating to let the disappointments go — to hurl them away, even. New Year’s Eve invites us to do this, to believe in our readiness to move on, and in the world’s readiness to let us do so.