Warning: philosophical life analysis ahead….

I was reading Alice Munro’s Runaway in the bathtub this weekend. It’s a collection of short stories I purchased after a strong recommendation from a friend. An amazing collection, for sure, one that makes me remember why I love literary fiction so much.

Tucked into the comings and goings of a woman named Juliet was a short reflection on her abandonment of her love of teaching and studying the classics. I almost missed the passage at first, with my penchant of skimming through paragraphs without action. But when I absorbed what I was reading, my breath caught.

Because she was not teaching Greek, she put it away.

That is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don’t think about it at all.

The thing that was your bright treasure. You don’t think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.

This is what happens.

When I was married, I packed the dreams of what I wanted to be into a box that we moved from job to job, house to house. And when my husband left, he took all the boxes he wanted, but I kept my box. But it took me a long time to realize I still had the treasure, the dream. I kept it packed even longer while I worked to make Money and start up someone else’s business.

I formally unpacked my box of treasures in August of last year when I finally decided to make a living as a writer. In the last paragraph of this lesson, Ms. Munro reminded me how important this is.

Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang on to it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.

I meet so many, so many people who long ago put away their bright treasures. They plug in different dreams followed by different excuses, sentences with, “Oh, I always wanted to …..,        but ……” Perhaps my blog’s stories of how I found my treasure again may help others to find theirs. It’s an ambitious hope, but a worthy goal, I think.