It ain't over ‘til the fat lady sings.  I've been casually acquainted with this phrase since Junior High when my history teacher Mr. Bartosiak would utter it with a juvenile seriousness and an astute English accent.  It has been many moons since then and yet the phrase has stuck like a bad bumper-sticker to the car that is my life.  I'm not quite sure how the fat lady came to play such a vital role in life but what I do know is that she has now become the yardstick by witch all changes, endings or as some of the "cup-half-full" optimists would call it a "new beginnings" are measured. 

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.  Is it the last day of the life you have lived?  Quite possibly yes it is.  Woe is me I am bombarded with so many beginnings and so many ends that sometimes it seems I am running in circles, going in loops, and surfing on spheres while closing doors and opening windows as I cross T's and dot I's like they are  little check boxes on an endless to-do list.

We are all but pawns standing still yet animated waiting for proverbial fat ladies to serenade us into the next phase in life.  We connect dots, we give things meaning and reason, and we are what we are simply because we are.  And the fat lady, what about our dear sweet fat lady? 

It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings is apparently a proverb.  One that essentially means that one should not ever assume the outcome of something until it has actually finished.  Obviously she was born on an Opera stage but over time she has turned into much more that a belching voluptuous beauty and now carries with her deep, prominent meaning regarding the untold future.  In other words if you are making plans then you most definitely should plan to be surprised.  And well you should probably never say never while you're at it.  I presume what Mr. Bartosiak was referring to was the over zealous eighth graders who had high school dreams and college wishes without actually competing junior high yet.  Hope is the seed of all humanity, without it we may as well be mechanical robots going from here to there with not rhyme and no reason.

But we waft from one stage to another as the fat lady graces us with her operatic soprano voice, not literally of course but in a more metaphoric matter of speaking.  Things have a strange way of taking form and morphing into a completely different shape and size from start to finish.    

And so in honor of all of life's such events the fat lady is the proud and budding icon of all things that have not yet finished.  I guess you can say she wears a crown of "never say nevers", a robe of "you never know ‘til you knows" and proudly holds up a torch of uncertainty.  So in a nutshell one should never put all of one's eggs in one basket, count one's chickens before all the eggs are hatched and so on and so forth.  Instead one should throw some caution to the wind and see where it leads.

By: Lucky Clover