Protagonists and Props

Sometimes I think of my life as a book. I wake up; I wash my face; I get ready for the day; I eat; I run; I work; I drive; I sleep; I; I; I.

With a protagonist being the main character of a story or leading role of a situation, it is assumed that "I" is the protagonist of the story here...of my own personal story. I wonder, though, am I really the protagonist?

This question came to mind as I sat in my car at a red light. Cars surrounded me on all sides. As I looked to my left, a man was on his phone. The young couple to my right were talking to each other laughing. The woman behind me and to the right had both hands on the wheel and was staring straight forward.

As I watched these characters, I began to imagine the stories of their lives. Perhaps the couple next to me had gotten engaged; or maybe they were brother and sister. Could the man next to me be receiving terrible news on the phone? Maybe the woman diagonally behind me was in a daze staring straight at the road because she had an exhausting day at work and was headed home to a family and warm dinner. I thought it was interesting that these people who were placed in my path had lives of their own; props in my life story could have a back story?

This is when a question hit me: Were these people in their cars props in my life? Or was I a prop in theirs?

I began to ponder how the dazed woman behind me had a story of her own, and from her perspective, I was just a prop in a car placed diagonally left from her at this moment in time. She had a whole story of her own that I had no idea about. She has her own book of her life.

We each have our own books being written about our lives. It's filled with new pages, different chapters, characters, climaxes, and resolutions, and each book is different for every person. The people in the cars next to me entered my book for just a sentence or two, but this stop light not only wrote a sentence in my book, it wrote one in theirs too. I was a character introduced into their books, just as they were props introduced into mine.

How amazing it is that we all get to enter into each others' stories. Perhaps we'll become permanent secondary protagonists to the story; maybe we'll only enter another person's story for just a few chapters. But all this got me to thinking, that even if I am only in a sentence of a person's book, I want that sentence to be a good one.

After all, a sentence can be a turning point in some stories. I want the pages of my own story to be filled with moments where I was the prop in someone else's life book, positively impacting their story and leaving a good mark on their life.