[Spoilers for those who haven’t read the book]
This book by Donald Miller was given to me as a thank you for leading a retreat last October, by my mentor and friend, Lauren. At the time, I was busy with school work and had about 100 other things to read, so the book collected dust on my shelf for a few months until I rediscovered it as I was packing up the things in my room to move back to my parents’ house for the few weeks before heading to Europe. The subtitle of the book is “How I learned to live a better story,” and I thought that it might be just the right read for two and a half months of traveling and backpacking with just the bare minimum (in truth, the necessary) of things in my bag.
As I hadn’t read much for my own (novels or short stories) over the past few months, and have formed a habit of annotating most things I read over the years that I have been studying, I felt the need to pick up a pen as I started reading Donald Miller’s book. There were sentences that stuck out to me that I felt needed to be marked, and sentences that I so strongly disagreed with that I felt needed angry comments in the margins.
Here are reflections on the things that provoked me to think further, both out of inspirations and anger:
“We don’t want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breathe and face conflict with courage. And if life isn’t remarkable, then we don’t have to do any of that; we can be unwilling victims rather than grateful participants” (Miller, 59).
Miller’s thesis revolves around life as a story, with similar patterns and elements. This fraction rather at the beginning of the book stuck out to me because it reminded me of the feeling that life is uncontrollable. I think realizing that we are al agents, no matter how small the actions we take and the change we initiate, is crucial to living a meaningful life. The phrasing that we are otherwise “victims” is, however, odd to me. Victims of what? Of a life without action, of a life that is remarkable? I think, rather than victims (which requires, in my understanding, another actor superior to us), we fall into a trap of passivity we often build ourselves. I want to acknowledge, too, however that I agree with Miller that it is easier to stay passive than act and work towards change.
“The point of life is character transformation” (Miller, 68).
YES! I agree. The point of life is character transformation. However, character transformation can’t give life meaning, I think. Rather, giving life meaning and working with/toward whatever life’s meaning is transforms one’s character.
“…create stability out of natural instability” (69).
Is what we as human beings strive toward, I think. It seems to be in our nature to find balance and patterns.
“But I knew I had to do something. I needed to live a real story with real action” (77)
[context: Miller describes that he spends much time living in daydreams, not doing much with his actual life, that he is living a boring story, so to say.]
I scribbled in the margins, here, that this is “way to simplistic. There is no way that so little thought went into this conclusion.” It bothers me that Miller spends so much time describing – what seem to me to be - rather mundane scenes, and so little time developing or describing thoughts that I perceive to be rather complex like the one above.
The whole chapter “Listen to your writer” was very hard for me to relate to. Miller intends to dissect what I call intuitions, thoughts we sometimes have that seem to come out of the nowhere, that call for us to do something out-of-the-ordinary, something new, something outside of our comfort zone, or thoughts and feelings that we better not do or say something we were inclined to be. While I call these thoughts and feelings intuitions, Miller states that this is “God writing something different” (87). God, according to Miller, is the better writer of all our stories, and, if we listen to Him, our stories will become better. Miller writes that “[he] started obeying” what God wanted him to do (88). This to me stands in contrast to much of what he was saying before. The word obeying carries with it undertones of submission and the lack of individual agency. I personally can not identify or reconcile with such a theology.
I believe that intuitions come from within us, from a place of knowledge that we all possess, but do not access—or have access to—all the time. Knowing, however, to watch out for thoughts or feeling that come from this place, has helped me to make certain decisions. Realizing that what felt right for this summer was spending more time than usual in France and in Germany, and feeling that Germany feels both more and less than home than in the past seven summers that I have not lived there, was certainly an intuition that I had, one that I chose to follow not knowing whether it would lead me into the right direction. I think that is also the difference between what I believe to be true about these intuitions and about Miller’s theology of God’s guiding story: I think that it is impossible to know for sure whether intuitions will lead to right decisions or wrong decisions, because it is impossible to anticipate the future. It is possible to take a guess, and a risk.
Miller goes on to say that “we change over time and our perspectives sharpen with experience,” and that I do agree with. Again, all experiences are part of our transformation as human beings, if we let them be such and take them in as more than passive bystanders.
Interview with a woman about domestic violence in which she says that “people fear change…[it] represents a world of variables that are largely out of [our] control” (101).
I agree. That is why intuitions that push us to change, or even just outside our comfort zones are terrifying, and at the same time necessary.
“I was still scared” (114).
[context: Miller writes about the experience of finding his father who had been absent in his life.]
My comment: You never stop being scared, not until you [face your fear] and most of the time recognize that what you were scared of isn’t actually scary, and that you are/were actually scared of the possibility that it would be.
In my experience, the anticipation of fear most of the time is worse than the object of fear—the anxiety of not knowing.
While analyzing advertisements on TV,Miller remarks that “most Americans aren't living very good stories. It’s not our fault, I don’t think. WE are sucked into it. We are brainwashed, I think” (122)
Again, it’s fascinating to note the passivity in his statement. My scribbles on the margin: or [living a bad story dominated by stuff rather than non-material values] is part of the upbringing in the US, that is so focused on money. Put another way, it’s part of the culture that capitalism has created, but it is also crucial to note that society forms culture. “Brainwashing” as Miller calls it, removes, again, agency and puts the blame in the hands of an anonymous other. Miller goes on to talk about material fulfillment, and I think that the wish for material possession is as much for personal fulfillment as it is about how others perceive you.
Going back to risk-taking, Miller describes how he signed up to hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, and says along the way “we should have followed the river” (which is the shorter, easier way) (141). Most of the times, in my experience, the harder path is what makes a journey worth wile, and most of the times an adventure is, in fact, about this journey much more so than the final destination. Maybe it’s the same with life.
Miller ends the beautiful chapter on Machu Picchu with these words: “IN more ways than I can count, my practice story had changed me. I no longer found myself as incapable of hard physical challenges, and I wasn’t watching as much television anymore. I was chasing a girl now, and it was going well” (144).
[context: just three lines before he wrote that the sight of Machu Picchu “made [him] think about the hard lives so many people have had, the sacrifices they’ve endured” (143).]
NO. No, no, no, no, no. How do you go from thinking about the men/women/human beings who carry rocks to build the amazing structures of Machu Picchu to “chasing a girl” and watching less TV? No. First of all that language is offensive to me (call me sensitive if you want), but more importantly it seems dismissive of the grandeur of the ancient structures of monuments like Machu Picchu. Yes, going there is maybe a good start to living a more meaningful life, but maybe next time take a bit more time to reflect on the meaning of such a journey and challenge and end a chapter in a better way. Especially since Miller later writes that even after his trip he wasn’t finished grieving his father. Why not write about grieving his father in Peru?