THE NEXT PAGE

I saw a line the other day that stayed with me.

“I was scared to turn the page until I realized I’m not the reader, I’m the author.”

I liked it immediately. Then I thought about it for a while and decided it wasn’t quite true.

There are pages in a life nobody would write for himself. Nobody sits down on Sunday evening and writes cancer into Tuesday. Nobody chooses the telephone call that changes a family, the accident on the highway, the marriage that ends, the job that disappears, or the doctor who closes the door before telling you what the tests showed. Some pages arrive already written.

I have lived long enough to know we control considerably less than we like to think we do. Other people make decisions that affect us. Time keeps moving whether we approve of its direction or not. Still, we usually have some say in what happens next.

When we are young, there seems to be an unlimited supply of pages ahead. There will be another summer, another Christmas, another afternoon to sit with your father. Another chance to call an old friend, or to say something you should have said the first time.

There will be other Sundays.

Usually we’re right, and that’s what makes it dangerous. There is another Sunday, then another, and because there has always been another one, we begin treating the next one as though it has already been promised. It hasn’t.

I have been working on a story called Every Other Time, built around a place I came to think of as the Unmade Library. It contains the lives beside the lives we actually lived. The great mistakes are there, but those are easy to recognize. The quieter things interest me more: the telephone call that wasn’t made, the invitation declined, the person we intended to visit next month, the ordinary afternoon when we were too busy to notice that it wasn’t ordinary at all. One sentence from the book has stayed with me longer than the rest.

He thought there would be other Sundays.

There usually were, until there weren’t.

Most of us have a few shelves of our own. We can walk through them whenever we choose, pulling down an old decision and examining it again. What if I had taken that job? What if I had stayed, or left, or said yes instead of no? There is nothing wrong with visiting those shelves once in a while. Regret can teach us something, and memory certainly can. Neither is a particularly good place to live.

We can’t empty those shelves, either. Every road taken means another wasn’t, and a life well lived will still leave an enormous library of unlived possibilities behind it. Sooner or later you have to walk out and return to the life still waiting outside.

That brought me back to the line about the reader and the author. A reader has one great disadvantage: the next page has already been written. He can worry about it or guess what it contains, and none of that changes a word.

Fear has an odd way of turning us into readers of a book that hasn’t been written. We imagine tomorrow’s conversation and lose the argument before it occurs. We decide the answer will be no before asking the question. We worry about the test result before the laboratory has produced it. We decide something will fail and use that imagined failure as a perfectly reasonable excuse not to begin. I’ve done my share of that.

The trouble with calling ourselves the authors of our lives is that it sounds as though we control the story. We don’t. Life can hand you a page you never wanted, and you may carry what was written there for the rest of your life. But eventually there is another page, and what happens there may depend, at least partly, on you.

It is rarely dramatic. Make the phone call. Keep the promise. Begin what you’ve been postponing. Sit another five minutes with somebody who needs you. Go to the doctor. Say you’re sorry. Tell someone you love them while they are still there to hear it. Get out of bed tomorrow morning and do what needs doing. None of that would make much of a movie. It makes quite a lot of a life.

Age changes the way you see the blank pages. When you’re twenty, they appear endless. Waste a few and there are thousands more. Put off the trip, delay the visit, don’t make the call tonight. There will be time.

At seventy-three, I know better.

There are more pages behind me than ahead. I don’t say that sadly. It is arithmetic. There is a considerable difference between having fewer pages left and having none, and perhaps knowing there are fewer finally teaches us something the abundance of youth could not. A blank page has value because the supply is not unlimited.

That doesn’t mean every remaining day must become an adventure. I have no desire to spend whatever years remain desperately checking experiences off a list. Frantic living wastes nearly as much as not living at all.

Most good days are ordinary. Coffee tastes right. Someone you love is in the next room. There is work worth doing. Somebody needs a little of your time and, for once, you give it without looking at the clock. The hard part is recognizing the ordinary moment before it becomes the one we wish we could have back.

I don’t believe anymore that we write the whole book. Too many pages arrive without our permission, and some leave marks that cannot be erased. Behind us are pages we wish we had written differently, and pages we never wrote at all. We can remember them and learn from them, and some we may always grieve. We just can’t write them now.

There is a page in front of me this morning, next to the coffee. I don’t know how many come after it. None of us does.

I know only that this one isn’t written yet.

And that means it is still mine.