I've been watching a lot of How I Met Your Mother lately. It's on Netflix and comes recommended.

If you are completly unaware, the entire show is told as flashbacks from 30 years or so in the future. The premise is the main character is telling his kids how he met their mother. The story has taken seven seasons.

I've not written a lot of fiction, just the first 1,000 words of the semi-autobiographical great American novel that everyone has started. Everyone has one of those right? 

I know the end of that story. Spoiler: the main character is in the Minneapolis airport looking at the flight board deciding what to do with this life. I don't know if most writers write with an end in mind or not, I don't think I could write something coherent if I didn't know where I was going.

But that's not how life works. Life is not a coherent, cohesive narrative. This past year of my life is not some incredible plot twist that is going to bring me closer to my ideal life.

Life's story isn't a story at all and while it's a nice plot device to look at every thing in your life as leading you to one shining moment of glory it turns decisions about dinner into life or death. 

That's where How I Met Your Mother gets it right. The choices the main character thinks are the important ones seldom are and it turns out the mundane ones mean a whole lot more.

I don't know how the story of my life will end, I don't even know how this chapter will end. Right now I don't even know how this blog post is going to end.

Perhaps all of those things are better left unfinshed.