Review – A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

It’s been over two months since I wrote on here… I figured it was about time I spilled out some more thoughts on here.  I read plenty of books, and at the moment I have plenty of time to read so I’ve gone through a few recently but none have struck me quite so hard as Donald Miller’s latest effort, ‘A Million Miles in a Thousand Years’.

Even before this book I was a fan of his work, telling anyone who would listen to read his previous books.  This one is probably his most powerful.  On the surface it sounds like a recipe for self-indulgence: Miller discovers that a movie company wants to make a film based on his New York Times bestseller, ‘Blue Like Jazz’.  ’Blue Like Jazz’ is semi-autobiographical, so essentially the film makers want to make a movie based on his life.  It seems hard to imagine something more myopic than a semi-autobiographical book about a movie which is based on another semi-autobiographical book.

What makes it so endearing and so powerful is that Miller does not dwell on his own success, in fact he is entirely self-deprecating.  Through the early parts of the book he comes to the awkward, embarrassing conclusion that in order for this movie to be any good, they are going to have to reinvent Don into a new character only loosely based on the reality.  His life is essentially too boring to be played out on screen.

What do you want to do?

I went to the job centre the other day.  I decided that while I’m looking and not finding a job I may as well get some money for it.  This was the final stage of a monotonous procedure designed to establish 1) if I was actually looking for a job and 2) if I secretly had loads of money.  The answers were yes and no respectiveley.  It could have been much quicker if they’d asked that rather than the form, the 40 minute phone call, and then the two interviews where I was asked the same questions about stocks, loans, and property, amongst other things, again and again.

The last person I saw was introduced to me as my advisor.  He was supposed to help me find a job (or at least check I wasn’t cheating the system).  So I sat down and he asked me:

“What is it you want to do?”

Fighting Gravity

So, self-help makes you feel worse, according to the BBC.  It shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise that we can’t simply tell ourselves who we want to be and then suddenly become that person through chanting abstract truths about ourselves.

However valuable we are, trying to convince ourselves of it is impossible.   John Donne said, “no man is an island”.  We can’t do it alone, trying to manufacture your own self esteem is like trying to pick yourself up by your own shoelaces.  Gravity will prove to be an unbeatable opponent in any such effort.  We can only get our worth from outside of us.  Saying “I am a lovable person” will be an empty and apparently harmful contradiction to us unless we already believe we are loved.  We need others to tell us that we are.

A beginning

I sit at the beginning of a new stage in my life.  Many things are unknown and unresolved right now.  I’ve just come to the end of three unbelievably great years as a Southampton University student, and I’m not sure what’s next.  To say I’ve learned and grown over the last few years would be a massive understatement.

I came to uni totally sure of my worldview, convinced I had all the answers for anyone who would doubt or challenge me.  For me truth was one dimensional, and anyone who made a genuine attempt to search for truth would surely end up agreeing with me.  As (half) a philosophy student my degree often dealt with the nature of truth and I had this idea that I would be able to sum up all the different views I came across by reading between the lines and discerning that everyone, whatever they thought or wrote, was really talking about the same worldview and the same truth that I had settled on.