The tagline for my novel writing efforts is “where secrets of the past meet stories of the present.” To me this conjures up thoughts of old love letters discovered in an attic; weathered maps that pinpoint hidden locations; family recipes long forgotten; photographs that hold clues to an unsolved mystery; postcards with cryptic messages scrawled in faded ink. When these bits and pieces from the past are uncovered, how will they change what characters believe and how they act? The potential of these scenarios is exhilarating.
In A Million Miles in a Thousand Years Donald Miller asks a different question: what happens when we view our own lives as stories?
“If Steve was right about a good story being a condensed version of life — that is, if story is just life without the meaningless scenes — I wondered if life could be lived more like a good story in the first place. I wondered whether a person could plan a story for his life and live it intentionally.”
As he ponders this idea, Miller acknowledges the things that hold us back:
“I’ve wondered, though, if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don’t want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgement. We don’t want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breathe and face conflict with courage. And if life isn’t remarkable, then we don’t have to do any of that; we can be unwilling victims rather than grateful participants.”
“Here’s the truth about telling stories with your life. It’s going to sound like a great idea, and you are going to get excited about it, and then when it comes time to do the work, you’re not going to want to do it. It’s like that with writing books, and it’s like that with life. People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain.”
“I was watching the movie Star Wars and wondered what made that movie so good. Of course, there are a thousand reasons. But I also noticed that if I paused the DVD on any frame, I could point toward any major character and say exactly what that person wanted. No character had a vague ambition. It made me wonder if the reasons our lives seem so muddled is because we keep walking into scenes in which we, along with the people around us, have no clear idea what we want.”
So how do we live lives that become meaningful stories?
“As I’ve said before, the main way we learn story is not through movies or books; it’s through each other. You become like the people you interact with. And if your friends are living boring stories, you probably will too. We teach our children good or bad stories, what is worth living for and what is worth dying for, what is worth pursuing, and the dignity with which a character engages his own narrative.”
As Miller began taking risks and living intentionally, he craved this type of life more and more:
“And I found myself wanting even better stories. And that’s the thing you’ll realize when you organize your life into the structure of story. You’ll get a taste for one story and then want another, and then another, and the stories will build until you’re living a kind of epic of risk and reward, and the whole thing will be molding you into the actual character whose roles you’ve been playing. And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can’t go back to being normal; you can’t go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time. The more practice stories I lived, the more I wanted an epic to climb inside of and see through till its end.”
I love the conclusion Miller comes to:
“Before I learned about story, I was becoming a fatalist. I was starting to believe you couldn’t find meaning in life because there wasn’t any meaning to be found. But I don’t believe that anymore. … I don’t ever want to go back to believing life is meaningless. I know there are biochemical causes for some forms of depression, but I wish people who struggle with dark thoughts would risk their hopes on living a good story — by that I mean finding a team of people doing hard work for a noble cause, and joining them. I think they’d be surprised at how soon their sad thoughts would dissipate, if for no other reason than they didn’t have time to think them anymore. There would be too much work to do, too many scenes to write.”
And here is his rousing call to action:
“We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn’t mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It’s a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them.”
This was really interesting to me. Not long ago I saw in the newspaper some fashionista talking about “curating” her image, and I thought it was so shallow. Then, on second thought, “curating” a life is simply about doing things with deliberation, not at random, and making an effort to do it beautifully. Great food for thought.