My life has become a Jane Austen construct with a postmodern twist...

in which the hero is never the person the heroine imagines he will be. As my middle sister, who is engaged to be married in early May, recently told me--It's never the first guy you feel a connection with (and she should know).

So while there is a very real part of me that hopes that a certain gentleman I met in March--with whom I share a compelling chemistry--will win my heart, I know that we're only a little ways into the narrative. I am trying to remain philosophical about it. Whether our union is fated or not, he has been crucial to my effort to change the romantic trajectory of my life. To quote another Austen-inspired heroine: "...am no longer tragic spinster..."

Perhaps life begins, for some, at the age of 33.

My mother, like many Austen matriarchs, is completely histrionic and therefore incapable of any logical discussion of my sister's pending nuptials or my quest for adventurous romances. Well, much like Elizabeth Bennett--self-actualized character that she was--had to do, I have to learn to disregard my mother's advice in this department. She sometimes talks to me from a place of limits and of fear, which is the last thing you need when you are trying to be open to whatever comes.

As the pages of my life unfold, so does realization. Here's what I've understood this week:

Instead of bregrudging myself the fact that I experience the world concretely, through my senses, I need to fully embrace this perspective. It serves me very well--I make very sound decisions as a rational observer. And when that perspective is limiting, I have any number of abstract-thinking friends and associates to complete the picture.

But when I act in opposition to my instincts, I am doomed. When the truth keeps asserting itself to me--through a means that I am particularly equipped to recognize--and I reject it, I am doomed. Any heroine in full possession of her place in the story knows that.

Yet, with all this having been said, I have also learned that you cannot rule out even the wildest scenario until the last scene. Sometimes this means playing a fool for most of the book. Wisdom parses itself out in obscured seeds. My empirical observations are subject to timing and visceral, intuitive knowledge--it has to fully integrate.

Sometimes you know the man is a scoundrel on page 1 but he doesn't disappear, entirely, until the penultimate chapter. If this blog were a novel, you, gentle reader, would already know who I am going to end up with...