Sometimes I think about things . . . while I'm walking . . . I have silent conversations with myself that help me clarify how I feel, how I view the world.

Here are some things I thought about this week:

People as Books

I think every person is a story. People like to say that our lives are books and we're each our own protagonist, but I see it a bit differently. This train of thought started out as my questioning why women like "bad boys" or, really, complicated men versus simply very nice ones. And it's not about fixing them or changing them. It's more that those complicated men are better stories. They're more interesting than a guy who had a happy, stable childhood.

I'm not saying this is right or wrong. I married a perfectly nice, good man. But when guys ask, "Why? Why do women like guys like that?" I think this is at least partly the answer.

We're all stories. And not all books appeal to everyone. Which is why not everyone is going to love you. And some books you don't keep forever. Which is why some people will "read" you and then walk away when they're done with you. But you belong in someone's library. For some people, you're a keeper. You've just got to find the right people for that, the people who read you and get you and treasure you.

We Are More Than What Happens to Us

That said, I began to think about how people perceive one another. In particular, I began to think how one's perceptions change when one knows something specific about a person.

I'm tiptoeing here. I should come out and say it. What I was thinking about was the way people perceive victims of sexual assault. How, once a person knows you've been a victim, that's sometimes all they see or think about you.

I said to myself, What do you see when you look at the moon? Well, you see the moon. And you often think of how beautiful she is that night, or you talk about the man in the moon, or the rabbit, or the goddesses associated with the moon. You maybe think of romance. Your first thought is never about all the meteoroids that impact the moon, leaving their marks on her. Because the moon is more than that, just as we are more than the events that impact us. The moon is still seen as a whole. She is not seen as a collection of pits and dimples. She is not looked at as broken. She still shines and is still beautiful, and so are people who have suffered.

Love Is Not a Universal Constant

We like to talk about love as being universal. As though we all have the same metric for love. You can ask people if they know what love is, and most if not all will say, "Yes." But their idea of love and yours and mine and anyone else's is not the same. It's rather selfish to assume your version of love is the correct one, the one that everyone must also live by.

People feel love differently and show love differently. And different relationships, too, have different forms of love.

I get tired of love being presented to me (in books, movies, wherever) as: "This is how it is, this is how it's done, this is what it means." There is no standard. I wouldn't even say there's a "normal" for love. Everyone has their own normal.

We all understand love as a concept. But we do not all feel it or act it the same way.

Those are the things I thought about while walking this week. I really just wanted to write them down, though they sounded much better in my head. Ah well. Better to capture them partly if not perfectly.