At our Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association chapter meeting this past week, one of the readings used during the opening worship service was the poem, “Rivited” , by Robyn Sarah – available on line with permission at The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor (select or scroll to post for Thursday, February 28, 2008).

Life isn’t like a box of chocolates for Robin Sarah, it’s like going to the theater:

…Now
we are being given tickets, and they are not
tickets to the show we had been thinking of,
but to a different show, clearly inferior.

Check again: it is our own name on the envelope.
The tickets are to that other show.

Dealing with my blog and other things, I’ve had a week like that. The tickets were to another show, clearly not the show I thought I had bought tickets for, but as Sarah points out when this happens, we can either walk out on the show or stay until then end

riveted, as it were;
spellbound by our own imperfect lives
because they are lives,
and because they are ours.

Whoa. If only Robin Williams had had this piece to work with in that early class scene in the school lobby in the Dead Poet’s Society.