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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.

This sets him on a journey to discover what it means to tell a good story, and therefore what it means to live out a good story.   The whole book is about a progression from mundane reality to living a meaningful narrative.  He finds motivation in the framework of living a good story to go from being unfit (“I was fat as a child and got fatter as an adult”) and unmotivated to riding his bike across America.  He uses the themes that have already been at work in his life to change his world and the world around him, as he uses his fatherless upbringing as incentive to find his father and to found a non-profit organization called The Mentoring Project which gives male role models to fatherless boys in America.

The lasting impression that this book leaves though is not any special admiration for Don, it is that he implores and inspires the reader to do likewise.  It is not that we must now live out Hollywood blockbusters with gun battles and car chases, it is that we all are capable of forming goals and ambitions, of overcoming conflict, and of creating memorable scenes for ourselves and others.  This is a rare book in that it I cannot see how one could read it, and not begin to examine their own lives, it’s truly jarring and powerful, but in a readable, humourous way.

One part of the book proved particularly striking for me in my current situation, I have left university and am now struggling to find work, it’s a call to persevere with what I believe in, to know the importance of pushing through even when I’m not sure what is around the corner.  He posted it on his blog long before the book came out, so it’s not in it’s final form, but the message is the same, I have copied and pasted it below:

Chapter Twenty-Five: The Thing About a Crossing

It’s like this when you live a story. The first part happens fast. You throw yourself into the narrative and you’re caught in the water, the shore is pushing back behind you and the trees are getting smaller. The other shore is inches away and you can feel the resolution coming, the feeling of getting out of you’re boat and walking the distant shore, looking back to see where you came from. The first part of a story happens fast, and you think the thing is going to be over soon. But it isn’t going to be over soon. The reward you get from a story is always less than you thought it would be, and the work is harder than you imagined. It’s as though the thing is teaching you the story is not about the ending but about the story itself, about your character getting molded in the hard work of the middle. The shore behind you stops getting smaller, and you paddle and wonder why the same strokes used to move you but they don’t anymore.  You got the wife but you don’t know if you like her anymore and you’ve only been married five years. You want to wake up and walk into the living room in your underwear and watch football and let your daughters play with the dog because the paddling doesn’t move the boat anymore and the far shore doesn’t get closer no matter how hard you work. The shore you left is just as far and there is no going back, there is only the decision to paddle in place or stop, slide out of the hatch and sink into the sea. Maybe there is another story at the bottom of the sea? Maybe you don’t have to be in this story anymore? Maybe you can quit and not have to paddle in place anymore?

It’s been like this with all my crossings. I have a couple boats and take them to Orcas Island and make the crossing from Orcas to Sucia, and it’s always the same about leaving the shore so fast and getting to the middle and paddling in place for hours.

I knew it would be like that when we crossed the country on bikes, too. I sent in my paperwork and did my miles in the mountains here in Oregon and showed up in Los Angels, knowing we would start fast, that the Pacific would fade behind us and we’d be in Phoenix by sunset and then we’d spend all the life of Moses crossing Texas and the Delta and it happened just like I thought it would. We grew into the roads and the roads are where we lived. We slept in rock quarries and on the doorsteps of churches. I slept on the floor of a convenience store just off the caprock in Texas. I put my head by the beer to get some cold air and it didn’t matter to me that I had a condo back home or a bed, because you become the character in the story you are living and whatever you were is gone. None of us thought it would end. We never felt close to the shore. Even in Virginia, we felt as far as Louisiana.

When we left Bob’s dock at midnight I didn’t want to paddle through the night or across the wide inlet. We had to go for hours into the pitch black and the inlet was so large and the dark was so dark for hours we couldn’t make out either shore. We had to guide ourselves by stars, each boat gliding close to another, just the sound of our oars coming in and out of the water to keep us close.

I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought and they can’t see the distant shore anymore and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger. They take it out on their wife, on their husband, they go looking for an easier story.

Robert McKee put his coffee cup down and leaned onto the podium. He put his hand on his forehead and wiped his grey hair back. He saidyou have to go there, you know. You have to take your character to the place where they just can’t take it anymore. He looked at us with a tenderness we hadn’t seen in him before. You’ve been there, haven’t you? You’ve been out on the ledge. The marriage is over now, the dream is over now, nothing good can come from this. He got louder.Writing a story isn’t about making your peaceful fantasies come true. The whole point of the story is the character arc. You didn’t think joy could change a person, did you? Joy is what you feel when the conflict is over. But it’s conflict that changes a person. He was shouting now. You put your characters through hell. You put them through hell. That’s the only way we change.

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?“

That question has routinely stumped me.  My real answers would have irritated him.  I want to make a difference, I want to learn, I want to love people, I want to do something that matters, at least to someone.

So I said “I dunno, work for a charity, or maybe in education.  Or I’ll just do some admin job for a bit.”

It seems to me that there comes a point where there is a decision to be made between fulfilling dreams or doing something sensible.  Something that will earn me money so I can one day get a car and a house and a wife and a pet. There’s a very real tension between the two options.

I could go and volunteer for a charity either in England or abroad and see what happens, I’ve seen a couple of really interesting projects.  I could also wait until a job comes along that I can bear and gives me some security.  Neither stands out as the correct, or indeed the wrong option.  The first could lead to amazing experiences and opportunities.  The second could be perfect for setting me up to do what I want to do.

The more I think about it, the more I am realising that this tension is exactly where I need to be.  In the tension I will be constantly reminded not to ignore my responsibilities whilst also avoiding losing sight of my dreams for the sake of security.  A decision will need to be made one way or another for sure, I’ll do that if I ever get offered a job or I see an opportunity I can’t refuse.

In the meantime I’ll keep firing off my CV to credit-crunch troubled companies and imagining ways to change the world whilst pocketing my £50 a week.  It’s not all bad, as long as I’m not in limbo for too long.

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.

This means firstly that others have a profound influence on how we see ourselves, but also that we have an equally profound influence on others.  We are all connected, we were designed for community and we forge our identity and personality alongside, not apart from others.  The child who is told either directly or indirectly by her father that she is a waste of space will internalise that and believe it, on the other hand a child who is told that she is valuable and has something unique to offer the world will be far more likely to be confident in communication and creativity.  Peers and partners can have the same effect.  The many reality TV programs on our screens are symptoms of the desire of people to be validated by the community around them.  They hang on the words of Simon Cowell and the public votes as they speak either life or death to their dreams and egos.

It all sounds rather fragile sometimes, as if we have to gain the approval of our peers in order to have any kind of self-esteem.   That is simply not true.  We already have insurmountable worth simply by being human.  For me I can look to the cross of Calvary where the God of the universe said to me, and all of mankind, that we all are worth dying for.  If we take hold of this we will see that trying to find our worth from within is just as foolish as trying to fight gravity alone when we have God and 6 billion other people to pick us up.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood how valuable people are, and how damaging it is when one group tries to tell another they are worthless.  He spoke of the value of a loving, united comminity in a sermon called “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution“:

“We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.”

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.

It seems obvious looking back that plan was always destined to fail.  As it happened I would sit in lectures  and find myself occasionally nodding my head as some guy’s thoughts and ideas seemed to have some relevance to mine, but mostly that didn’t happen.  Mostly everyone came to completely different conclusions about the world and people and everything else.

That’s not only true of philosophers, it’s true of everyone.  Everyone has their own different conclusions, their own thoughts on how this world works.  Some even think that there are no conclusions and that life doesn’t work.  That’s an answer too.

I gave up on the idea that I had it all figured out and everyone else was just waiting to fall in line pretty fast.  What I did see, however, was that in general people were asking the same basic question.  That question wasn’t “What is the meaning of life?” or “Why are we here?” as I was expecting.

Meaning is just not important to some people.   It only has relevance as far as people ascribe value to there being an objective meaning.  For the most part people are simply asking “What will it take for me to be happy?” and then pursuing whatever it is.  There are plenty of people who are happy to live without meaning, or at least convinced that they will construct their own significance rather than there being any objective meaning.

I’ll (maybe) leave the discussion on what that might be for another time.  For now it is enough for me to say that I am less and less interested in dealing with answers and more and more convinced that we grow depending on the questions we ask.  It is in the human spirit to question, debate, and develop in that way.

The other half of my degree was maths.  In maths once you get to an answer you stop trying to work things out.  That works very well in maths, in life things don’t resolve that easily.  Maths only models reality, I don’t want models, I want what’s real.  I don’t want to be the guy who thinks he’s got it all worked out, only to stop questioning and miss out on the wonder of discovery.

There are plenty of things I’m sure of, even some things I would put my life on.  One of those things is that there is only one mind that’s got it all figured out, and He is not me.  God created us to journey into His world and it would be a real shame not to venture out, we sell ourselves short when we get complacent in our answers and refuse to move.  This blog will hopefully be a record of checkpoints along the way where I’ve stopped to wrestle with certain thoughts and ideas.  Maybe some people will enjoy reading and journeying with me, if not I’ll just enjoy writing it!