Lost - and found!

In many regards we are all lost. There are those who have a clear sense of mission, career and path and those who are  dumbfounded by their existence. I find this a common quandary for many of my contemporaries and a common lament among the masses. Even the fabled Forrest Gump, despite all his runs through history and checkered life, had to ask his mother on her deathbed what he was here for. Her answer still offers cold comfort: "You have to figure that out yourself, Forrest". But it has occured to me that what Forrest went through is applicable to most of us. We don't realize that we are indeed creating our own histories; inventing our own misadventures; formulating our stories with their chapters and high drama. Forrest Gump went through remarkable run ins with history and pop culture without being aware of it. He waltzed through it all oblivious to the fact. I have often asked myself, perhaps in a fit of wishful thinking, if maybe I was actually going through grandiose scenarios that were being played out on an epic stage, and I would not know about it until I was a dying old man, marveling at the august story that was my life. Perhaps not. I have not jogged from one coast to the other or fought the ravages of the Vietnam War or met a litany of presidents at the Oval Office. But yet my life has stories nonetheless and they are all worth telling. They are not the ones I thought I'd be recounting  when I was twelve but they are of value nonetheless. So while the relative uneventfullness of my life brings me dissapointment I am reminded of Shakespeare's famous assertion: "All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts". Have I forgotten that I swam in the lowest point on the planet Earth, the Dead Sea? That I spent a week visting France completely by myself, not knowing a single human being there? Or that I personally checked in former president George W. Bush at a hotel, bantering with him in his suite while we both unloaded his bags as though we were buddies, with not another soul present? Yes, the things we forget. A placid life perhaps I have not lead. Is it possible Forrest Gump and I are not that different after all? I would not compare myself with the famous gentlemen from Alabama. As he would say, "That's all I have to say about that".