Perhaps you’ve never played in left field, but I have, though usually they put me in right field, since I am left handed. Now left field, in my favorite ballpark, Fenway, has all kinds of crazy angles not to mention the bounces off the Green Monster. You can get seats in the stands next to the Monster and see all its dimples, from where balls has smashed into the wall. It looks like a horizontal hail storm of Biblical proportions assaulted the green metal wall there. Perhaps now you will see what I mean when I say Donald Miller comes at you from out of left field— all kinds of unexpected bounces and angles and caroms.
In this latest episode, our intrepid writer decides its time to change his story. I don’t merely mean he has changed his tune. No Don, is still Don, a laid back Pacific Northwest kind of dude. Nor by ‘change his story’ do I mean he is now telling the truth where as before he was fudging. I mean that: 1) he has come to look at his life as an ongoing saga, and 2) he has learned he has some say in which way it is going, and so 3) he has taken some actions to deliberately change his story, so it will be a better story.
Life, is like a story, and Don wants to explore that analogy to the hilt, and see what life lessons one can glean from such an analogy. And as it turns out, there are more than a few. What prompted all this was when the film dudes came and talked to him about turning Blue like Jazz into a movie. At that juncture, he got religion about thinking narratologically about his life. And some of this comes from his going to the famous story guru, consulted by all the Hollywood types who want to make great films, Robert McKee, who has a story workshop he does.
Here, at the outset is how Don describes his hope about life “If I have a hope, its that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story, and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, ‘Enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you.” (p. 59).
Don is indeed a Christian, and he believes God does have plan in mind, a story to tell, and he has given us roles in his larger story. But here’s the thing. We are not pre-determined characters in someone else’s story. God has left space in the larger story for us to freely create, and in a creative way, something beautiful with our part of the macro-story. Don’s book is not a sort of literary version of the old pop song ‘make your own kind of music…..’. It’s actually much closer to Bob Dylan’s ‘Change my Way of Thinking’.
Don knows that some people think there is no larger story they are called to be a part of. This gives them permission to see themselves as leading meaningless lives, or at least see themselves as unwilling victims rather than grateful participants in life’s story. He adds “I’ve never walked out of a meaningless movie thinking all movies are meaningless….I wonder then, if when people say life is meaningless, what they really mean is their life is meaningless.” (pp. 59-60). Maybe embracing nihilism is just a way of avoiding having to be part of, or create your part of the Story. It’s excuse making, and choosing the couch over the change.
So what happens when Miller begins applying what he learned at the McKee seminar to his own life and story? Here’s a starting point—- “the point of life is character transformation”. (p. 68). I basically agree. Most good stories involve the protagonist going through some sort of change as the story goes on. And if we are talking about a life worth living this is true as well. Life beckons us to change, to be bigger, better, bolder, kinder, etc. It does not whisper “be happy with and embrace who you already are”, the usual psycho-babble crap you get from self-help gurus.
The truth about who ‘we already are’ is that I’m not very good left to my natural tendencies, and neither are you. One of the things Miller observes is that the human body is constantly changing (for example every cell in the body is swapped out about every six months). If we learn something from the lesson of our bodies, we are always changing and so he muses that perhaps “we were designed to live through something rather than attain something, and the thing we were meant to live through was designed to change us.” (p. 70). Or maybe we were meant to both live through something and attain something. It’s not just about the joy of the journey, it’s also about reaching a certain destination, say for instance— home (see the parable of the prodigal).
Miller goes on to say that who we really are is what we really do, particularly under pressure. By this he means in part that pressure reveals what sort of person we really are, and we learn this by what we do in such situations. Take for instance a car accident. A person may be very high minded and well intended in advance of hitting someone going through an intersection, but may panic when it really happens, and it becomes a case of hit and run. The person has created a bad story for themselves, and the crisis has revealed their real default mode of existence, which involves self preservation among other things. Is it possible that a person sometimes acts ‘out of character’ in such moments? Sure, but when there is a repeated pattern of such behavior (‘when in doubt, chicken out’) , then one has to say—- ‘this is who I really am’. In the case of the guy who splits from the scene of the accident, a coward is who he is.
About his own life, Don is naturally a person who lives inside his head, and lives in various of his fantasies, including romantic ones. But there came a day when he was awakened from his fantasies and realized his life definitely lacked glory. Things had been pretty vacuous and meaningless but there was a way to change the story. In Don’s case it involved ‘practice stories’ like getting in shape and going and climbing Machu Picchu in Peru, or riding from San Diego to Washington D.C. on a bicycle. And it involved a very real story of searching for and finding his actual father, whom he had not really known, and whom he had had no contact with for over 30 years.
A general rule about characters in a good story is that they don’t want to change, and so something has to prompt or even force them to change. “Humans are designed to seek comfort and order, and so if they have comfort and order, they tend to plant themselves” (p. 100). Don uses the examples of women who have been abused and have escaped to shelters, and yet the majority of them return to their abusers. Why? People prefer what little comfort th
ey can get from a familiar and known situation, than choosing the unknowns of change which they fear deeply. So what happens so often is the story forces the person to change, and sometimes they have enough gumption to use that forward motion to intentionally change their own stories.
Don reflects on the fact that the most frequent commandment in the Bible is ‘fear not’! (over 200 occurrences). The reason for this command is that God knows we have our fears, and God does not want us to be bossed around by our deep fears. “Before I realized we were supposed to fight fear, I thought of fear as a subtle suggestion in our subconscious designed to keep us safe, or more important, keep us from being humiliated.” (p. 108). What he learned was that fear is a manipulative emotion which causes us to live a very boring life.
Do you remember the Hitchcock thriller, ‘Rear Window’. Its a fascinating story about Jimmy Stewart playing the role of a voyeur of sorts watching other people in a neighboring apartment complex go through their daily lives. Only the time comes when something drastic happens, something Stewart thinks he must do something about. In other words, there is an inciting incident, that changes a person who merely watches other people’s stories into a person who interjects himself into the story. We see this happen all the time. A mother loses a child to MS, and becomes a crusader against that disease, whereas before she was content to let others beat the drum for the cause. By definition an ‘inciting incident’ is a one way door. Once you walk through it, you can’t go back to the way things were before. You have to go forward in some way.
Miller also believes that while God wants us to create beautiful stories, there is also an evil force in the world that doesn’t want us to face our issues, face our fears, and instead settle for creating meaningless stories. I believe he is right about this. There is something tangible and powerful that wants to thwart all that is good and true and beautiful.
One of the more powerful sections of this book is in the middle (pp. 121ff.) where Miller begins to reflect on the fact that most Americans aren’t living very good stories, and a good deal of the reason is we have been suckered into it. The average American encounters thousands of messages a day beseeching him or her to be a consumer in this or that way, and to believe ‘if I only make this small change or buy this, then that will fix this big problem over here’. In other words, like Pavlov’s dog, we have been programs in wish fulfillment, stimulus response sorts of ways. The three steps of marketing are: 1) convince people they are miserable; 2) convince them they will be happy if they buy this or that; 3) put something funny or a scantily clad individual in the commercial to induce them to hop in the car and go get it.
Sadly most Americans these days are leading lives that involve a story of eating bad food, driving gas guzzling cars, having unrequited loves and bad sex, seeking mindless entertainment, and working in unfulfilling jobs so they can pay for all the aforementioned items. The lusts or desires we have become the stories we live, and it costs us, again and again. The question about having drives and a driven life is—- Who’s doing the driving?
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