The life of John and Mary

John and Mary fall in love and get married. They both have worthwhile and remunerative jobs which they find stimulating and challenging. They buy a charming house. Real estate values go up. Eventually, when they can afford live-in help, they have two children to whom they are devoted. The children turn out well. John and Mary have a stimulating and challenging sex life and worthwhile friends. They go on fun vacations together. They retire. They both have hobbies which they find stimulating and challenging. Eventually they die. This is the end of the story.

(Atwood, in Lee, ed., 1985:370)

Is it a story? What is a story? These are the questions the author asked in The Routledge Creative Writing Coursebook (a very good book by the way). "This passage, in affluent societies, is what living 'happily ever after' means, or is supposed to mean..." "Imagine reading long, detailed descriptions of John's hobbies, or of their endless vacations together!... it would bored us to death."

The author aims to point out that a proper story, one that's able to engage us, requires two sets of things:

1) A close-up realization of Where, When and Who: the immediacy, the specific and minute-by-minute vividness, the very features that makes the story real.

2) A sense of danger, encounter, incident, disruption. (Why we aren't happy reading happiness is another case, and possibly a mystery.)

Isn't it the same with the story of our life? I wonder.

While we constantly devote our attention to the grand scale of things, like education, qualification, promotion, vacation, pension, shouldn't we at least spend a few minutes to savour the happenings, the intensiveness of everything that's going on around us? The air we're breathing in may smell sweetly different from yesterday because of the change of seasons. The glass of water you're drinking may be reflecting a marvel of light that once inspired Newton's optics and the Impressionists' palette. The beauty of nature, the good will of a stranger, the grin of your loved one that belongs only to you, every bit of our fickle reality could be easily and silently missed.

We all wish that life is mellow, flowery, nice and death-free, like in Disneyland. But of course reality bites. And even fairy tales have the dodgy part before the happy ending. While we're complaining to the Author, it may ease our pain by turning our thought to the possibility that without all the unexpected, the risk, the turbulence, the suffering, life could be equally unbearable on the extreme scale of another end – namely, boredom.