Tragedy plus time equals comedy.
—Steve Allen
The bipolar condition describes the fate of humans gifted with the capacity for pleasure and pain, good and evil, ecstasy and agony. If every life is a storyline, then we have to ask, why that story? Can it be told, even described in retrospect, in different terms, flipping tragedy for comedy?
Even in present time, we have the option to cast our lives in starkly opposite terms, by a whim of emotion: getting up on a different side of the bed. In a positive mood, everything is groovy: I’m healthy, free, in love. My drum is singing, the book I’m working on will be a best-seller, my team has won four in a row. Life, in a word, is sweet.
A cloud comes scudding across the sun, and my teeth start to ache. I am trapped in this decaying body, this useless job, unloving and unloved. My art? In this storyline, I’m a wanker, a hack. My optimism came from viewing the world through rose-colored glasses. Disabused of illusions, my life is tawdry, inconsequential.
Which narrative to choose? The point, rather, is that we can choose our own adventure. Not just in New Year’s resolutions, or New Age faith in manifesting our dreams; but in viewing our past and present circumstances, our quality of life. The past is not cast in stone unless it is carved there. 
And even then, that’s just one version, never the last word.
The present? When we are truly present, in the present, free of past or future considerations, there is freedom also from narrative constraints. Narrative is linear, depending on the sequential flow of time, and of written speech. Stopping time, stopping judgemental interpretations of our lives, stillness arises and spreads. A space opens between narrative dichotomies, where we might sit, at rest, holding these and all possibilities as only that, as potential narratives.
Then we can re-enter the dream in more lucid awareness, where the dream can turn in any direction, as it will or as we might direct. Back to stillness, how does that feel, does it ring true? Try again, see how the next story fits. In truth, our life may not be pinned down to any single narrative. Or if we do so anyway, out of impatience to say something meaningful about it, then we must allow that in the next iteration, the plotline will vary; the characters will show different sides of their psyches; our responses, like those of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, will vary according to our capacity to gain self-awareness, to learn and grow.
In the stillness between narratives, we gain freedom from narrative constraints, and from the bipolar tendency of our dualistic personalities. Neither as good as we hope nor as bad as we fear, we find a more enduring truth of our condition in the undefined, the uncolored, the unlimited grace of simply being. Where what is, just is, as it is.
If you ask or feel compelled to characterize further, in a positive light or negative, go ahead: that is our human prerogative. Just know that either way, however you read or write that story, it’s just that: one possible story. There is always another version waiting to be written.
