Well hey their Marvel fans, I see you sitting there waiting for the credits to role so you can watch that minute clip that gives away the secrets for the sequel. Yeah look, I’m a huge superhero movies fan too, actually just a movies and stories fan in general. A little time ago, I sat watching a movie and was vibing out to the song playing while the credits rolled, I just let it play without turning it off because the song was THAT good! Then after the credits had nearly finished, a little clip started playing, and although I’d just watched a two-hour story unfold, that little one minute clip changed so much, someone was alive, the ending, was in fact not the ending, even after every credit had rolled on through.
Endings, are not our endings… in fact they are often a prequel to a sequel. I love writing stories, novels and scripts, I’ve been in love with it since I was a child making stories up with my siblings, making family plays we’d act out. The highlight of our school holidays sometimes was renting 7 weekly videos for $7, the more kids that left home, the more video choices I got to make on my own ( oh ya, I have 11 siblings haha just FYI). While there’s so much in our lives we can’t control, in writing my own stories, I can control what the characters do, who they choose to love, the boldness and skills they have, the arc of their development and growth, who dies and who lives, and most importantly what I’m saying and telling through the story. But I realised something, although I believe there is divine timing and providence, we actually choose so much of what we step into, we choose how we react to certain situations or people, we still choose what we say and how we say it!
What if our spare time, was actually where we created our future? What if those little things most people miss are actually making way and setting you up for what’s to come? What is the one-minute spiel (the secrets to the sequel) you’d tell yourself going into the next chapter and season of life after learning all you could from the last one? If people are stories like movies and books, we are all series with more episodes and seasons than Grey’s Anatomy. Don’t skip the credits, don’t skip the “boring bits”, because the movie wouldn’t have happened without those faceless names rolling through the screen. Words like discipline, reflecting, learning, understanding, developing, play and creativity come to mind when thinking about things we can do when no one is watching, after all, this is what integrity is all about, the unseen, faceless yet necessary things that make the seen (like a movie) so great, genuine and powerful!
Those things aren’t always so fun to do right? You know what makes everything a lot more fun, joy, no not your neighbours grandma Joy down the road, merry and jolly joy! It’s in joy’s nature to bring vision and hope. Hope and vision are gifts that keep on giving, ‘want’ lives in the future, but hope and vision, they pave the road to the future from the here and now, and if hope and vision are a pathway, joy is a railing of light that keeps you from fear of falling, it allows you the freedom to dance along the path, rather than walking with trepidation of ‘what if’s’ and what’s below. Eyes on the steps in front of you, not too far ahead. It’s like baking bread - you put it in the oven knowing it will rise, you set the timer and you walk away, it will tell you when it’s ready, trust the timer, we don’t sit in front of the oven hoping and praying it will rise and thinking of all that could go wrong, if you’ve put the right ingredients in, there’s no worry needed. If you’ve put purpose, kindness and life and light giving love in, (even when it’s hot) you’ll get the bread, it always produces sustenance in time.
You may not be a marvel movie, but you are a marvel, and you and I are always learning, always growing, always figuring out what works and what doesn’t serve us. So before you walk into the next chapter and flip the page, wait for the credits to role, it doesn’t matter how small, 20 seconds can change the whole movie that just happened before it and lead the way into the next, you decide what you let live and die in your heart and mind, these are the secrets to the sequel.
Big love,
O.J.S X