A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life by Donald Miller

I have been writing on this blog for almost eight years. And I have been very, very consistent about it for the last eight years. I have never read a book and not written about it--at least in a cursory way--on here. Until now. I am pregnant with my fourth baby, very sick, and our ward's brand new Young Women's president. And guess what has had to go? Everything that is not having to do with staying alive, keeping my children alive, and doing the basics in surviving my calling. That means uploading and organizing my photos--something I used to do religiously--has gone out the window. Making and preparing food--no way. Anything that has to do with my own personal development and interests--nope. I haven't had the energy to do anything. Anything. Other than lying in the fetal position in bed and watch four and a half seasons of The Office over a couple of weeks.

But I think I am slowly starting to come out of it. I did throw up today, but I felt like a normal human yesterday. I think it's getting better. So maybe I can start being a person again and start making food again and maybe even catch up on this blog. I have loved keeping this blog up for the last few years, and I don't want to let it die. But I'm guessing my posts are going to keep getting shorter (there has definitely been a trend of much shorter reviews in the last few months) and maybe eventually it'll just be a few sentences or I'll just have to resort to using Goodreads to track my reading. But for now, I think I'm back.

All of that is to lead into me saying that I read this book a while ago, and really enjoyed it, but don't remember much about it now. It was at least a month ago that I read it. Miller makes a really interesting point about what he learned while working with screenwriters while trying to turn his own book, a memoir about his life, into a movie. It was a weird process, trying to see himself as a character in a movie, and he realized that his own real life was really boring and not inspiring at all--not at all the sort of person you would want to watch in a movie. When you don't have a purpose or any action or direction or conflict in your life, then what are you doing? What is the point? He realized these things and decided to consciously change his own story by adding those things to it and making it more of a story that he'd like to read.

I loved his thoughts and how they were interspersed with his own memoir of how he deliberately worked to change his story. He tried hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, he fell in love and then out of love, he started cycling for charity. He started adding new and interesting conflicts to his story.

I marked some pages with interesting quotes that I'll just copy here:

"You get a feeling when you look back on life that that's all God really wants from us, to live in aside a body he made and enjoy the story and bond with us through the experience."

"Nobody really remembers easy stories. Characters have to face their greatest fears with courage. That's what makes a story good. If you think about the stories you like most, they probably have lots of conflict. There is probably death at stake, inner death or actual death, you know. Those polar charges, those happy and sad things in life, are like colors God uses to draw the world... Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in. We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller."

"If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation... If story is derived from real life, if story is just a condensed version of life, then life itself may be designed to change us, so that we evolve from one kind of person to another."

"The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. If you want to know what a person's story is about, just ask them what they want. If we don't want anything, we are living boring stories, and if we want a Roomba vacuum cleaner, we are living stupid stories. If it won't work in a story, it won't work in life."

"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."

It definitely made me start thinking about what is the story I want to be living. Of course, after reading it, I have been in a practical coma of self-absorption and exhaustion. But my best self, my usual self, has lots of ideas about what I want to be like and what I want my story to be. And I'll get there soon enough, once I'm out of the morning-sickness-induced funk that we've been in around here.