Ch. 2: There comes a time when a decision has to be made. Well, someone does. Ideally not me. Gotta run!
- Ch. 1: Science has to be right all of the time. Magic only has to be right once. Or twice.
- Ch. 2: There comes a time when a decision has to be made. Well, someone does. Ideally not me. Gotta run!
- Ch. 3: Please be careful as passengers may have shifted during flight.
- Ch. 4: This is probably going to end well.
- Ch. 5: Take me where I need to go. Show me what I need to learn.
- Ch. 6: Depth of Field
- Ch. 7: Mirror, mirror on the wall … who’s the guy behind me?
- Ch. 8: I thought this was a volunteer position?
- Unknowing Majestic Mystic: The Plot
- Ch. 9: Isn’t there a back office job in the superhero department?
- Ch. 10: There is no manual for superheroes. Is there?
- What if magic were closer than we thought?
If you have to think about it, you probably aren’t ready to answer it.
There’s a time when you know that if you go Route A, you’ll probably end up in this way. If you go Route B, you might end up there.
The thing is, you don’t really want to make a decision at all. You just want to make it all go away. You’d rather hide out and maybe close your eyes and hope that when you open them again, it was all just a dream.
This is Chapter Two in the Unknowing Majestic Mystic series (UMM) where our dear hero has unwillingly and practically unknowingly acquired some sort of paranormal superpower that he doesn’t understand or really even want. Or does he?
It’s about responsibility, it’s about standing up and making your voice heard. It’s about decision making and yes, it’s painful. Yes, it takes effort. No, you can’t hide. Well, yes, you can hide, but you know you can’t. You can’t if you’re going to be the sort of person you want to be. In other words, you can’t hide from yourself. You can’t hide from who you truly are.
You know you don’t want to be the person that things happen to. You know you’re the sort of person that makes things happen.
Who is that woman in the cafe and what does she have to do with me? How does this all relate to Italy? Why me?
What am I supposed to do?
I saw three options in front of me:
- Do nothing.
- Tell her she’s got the wrong guy.
- See what she wants.
Option one wasn’t going to work as I couldn’t even not think about it, which was already breaking the rule of doing nothing. Doing nothing was already a lost cause. I was, somehow, too deeply involved.
Behind door number two was going to mean confrontation and I already knew I was going to lose that battle. Who was I to stand up to ink eye woman, anyway? If I was in the kindergarten class of living receipts and some sort of power of sight, she was at least in middle school and I would probably be told to get back to my seat and think again about my options.
Which left option number three. I couldn’t deny that options one and two weren’t going to happen. Wait, that’s a triple negative: couldn’t deny plus not going to happen. Does that mean they are going to happen? I need to write up a math equation. But I didn’t. I knew the answer. There wasn’t even a question. I was making up questions just to stall for time. In fact, I knew exactly what I needed to do. I needed option three.
She was still looking at me.
She was so confident, so sure, so calm. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have qualified for any of those three. But I had one thing going for me, that I could say with all certainty. I wasn’t sure what that one thing was, but I knew I had it going for me.
No, that was it! I had a sense of humor. I had a lightness that allowed me to rise above all of this and go with the flow, just take it as it comes along. What do I possibly have to lose anyway?
What do I have to lose? To lose!? Seriously? Let me count the ways:
- My life will be transformed forever and I’ll never again know the beauty and simplicity of the person I was before. Yeah, so there’s that and I’m only on number one. Should I even continue?
- I could die. Be killed. You know, like not living anymore. I don’t know how, but it seems like a good number two and is probably standard on all “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” lists.
- I could find out that I do have some sort of powerful vision that transforms me into an unwilling superhero and I have to do things like save the world from evildoers and other such nonsense. Did I really just say evildoers? I need more coffee.
- It could be scary.
- There is probably no turning back. No secret escape button. Even if there were, I would have then seen the future and the possibilities and I couldn’t then turn back to a drab life of a regular Joe when I knew I stood in front of the door to possible greatness, on the cliff of the unknown, on the precipice of, oh, you get the idea. I didn’t really have any options.
- I would lose faith in myself if I didn’t stand up and see what she wanted. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe she had a twitch in her eye and part of a blue napkin flew in and got it infected. It could happen.
So I have all of that to lose.
Which was nothing. I had nothing to lose. She knew it, I knew it. She even knew that I knew it. I actually had no options.
I stood up.
Wait, should I pay for my drink first?
No, walk towards her. It needs to happen now. What do they say? This moment is the first day of the rest of your life? But if I get transported to who knows where, I might get pulled back because I didn’t pay for my non-chai chai drink.
I put four Euros on the table. Now I was free to move about the cabin.
I took a deep breath. Well, that’s just a saying. I didn’t really take anything. In fact, the breath took me.
I looked at her. She smiled. A knowing smile. What did she know that I didn’t? Uh, everything.
I took a step. Now I couldn’t go back. This was it.
