Life is all about transforming from one person in the beginning to an entirely different being in the end.
As we move through life, as we live, participate and even help create our own stories, we change.
Or, so we hope.
The last several months I’ve been subject to profound change. Earth-shattering, the-world-is-not-flat types of change; they have shaken beliefs, habits and relationships to their core.
Lately, I’ve become a fan of the memoir. I enjoy reading or observing people’s stories. Maybe it’s the deep-rooted journalist/storyteller in me, or maybe I’m just human and enjoy a good story. Inherently, since reading more and more memoirs, I’ve looked at my life as a long story – wondering how this particular chapter in my life reads, trying to notice in-the-moment the closing of a chapter or daydreaming of what the future story holds.
Lots of daydreaming, and it always ends up being a great story. Funny how that works, huh?
But lately, maybe even always, if I’m just now waking up to the fact – I haven’t lived a good story. I’ve always played it safe, and sought a life of comfort over risk and adventure.
That’s not what makes a good story.
I’m not saying I need to jump off a cliff or climb Mount Everest — though mountain climbing has always had a certain appeal to me — rather, I need to listen to that voice inside me, or what Donald Miller in his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, calls “The Writer,” when it tells me to step off the safe path I’ve chosen.
I was watching a reality show on television… and I wondered what a show might look like if a camera followed me around. I wondered what people would think. That is, setting aside my daydreams and wants and thoughts and revealing my life through an objective camera lens. The thought was humbling. In truth, I was a person who daydreamed and then wrote down his daydreams. Sure, there were other characters, friends and business associates, but I wasn’t living any kind of sacrifice. My entire life had been designed to make myself more comfortable, to insulate myself from interruption of my daydreams. – A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, pg. 77.
In the last few months, I’ve become just short of obsessed with the movie (500) Days of Summer. It just feels like a story I’ve lived, or, had I put pen to paper – would have written. I’ve watched the film and put myself in the place of the protagonist, Tom, imagining the cameras follow me through the ups and downs of a relationship. I can even identify with the preamble of the story, where Tom is described as growing “up believing that he’d never truly be happy until the day he met ‘the one.’ This belief stemmed from early exposure to sad British pop music and a total misreading of the movie, ‘The Graduate.’”
The Graduate, another premise of a story I can identify with, lounging around while failing to live a good story.
And it’s true, I have a deep-rooted belief that I’ll be unhappy until I meet ‘her,’ and have a family. In fact, my deepest rooted fear is never getting that. My daydreams, my many, many daydreams center around whichever particular woman I’m infatuated with in my mind this week, and what that life would look like. I’m great at daydreaming beautiful, romantic love stories. I’m horrible at creating a real life story.
It’s an odd feeling to be awakened from a life of fantasy. You stand there looking at a bare mantel and the house gets an eerie feel, as though it were haunted by a kind of nothingness, an absence of something that could have been, an absence of people who could have been living there, interacting with me, forcing me out of my daydreams. – A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, pg. 76.
So, here I am awakened from a life of fantasy, looking at a room void of pictures that would tell a grand story and wondering what step I need to take.