Day Thirty-Four: Character Development

            After yesterday’s writing I continued with my morning practices, which includes a short meditation.  I realized that I forgot to meditate the morning before and I wonder if that was a contributing factor to my out of sorts feeling.  After my meditation I felt much better, not a hundred percent but better.  As I was getting up I had a thought that made me giggle, character development.  As a writer I’ve been told over and over again that characters can’t be static, they can’t be nice all the time or happy all the time, in order for the character to grow (and thus be an interesting character) they must encounter conflict, they must be complex characters.  When you think about people in real life they aren’t happy all the time.  Every day we are faced with choices that shift us emotionally all day long.  We can bounce from happy to sad and back to happy again in seconds, at least I know I can.  After that meditation, I realized that I am working on my own character development, I’m not going to be Sally Sunshine all day every day and it’s okay.  That’s the part that really helped me to turn my day around.  It’s okay that I’m not spiffy, happy all the time.  Challenges help us to grow and develop.  These challenges aren’t always going to be something that makes you smile, usually quite the opposite, but what I have learned from a dear friend is that you can only go as high as you go low, so the challenge that you face today that might be causing you to have a bad day or worse, is really just the Universe helping you develop your character so you can smile even brighter tomorrow.