Life As Story

FOR A WHILE NOW I've been working on a project called, "Storyline." It's the brainchild of Donald Miller. The project is about creating a life-planning process based on the elements of story and was developed combining the principles of screenwriting and storytelling.

I'm a big fan of Donald Miller--for several reasons: one, he is an excellent writer; two, his ideas of looking at our lives as STORY makes a lot of sense to me.

I love bildungsroman. Some of our most timeless and treasured stories are bildungsroman. You know the ones:

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

Bildungsroman are stories where the protagonist "comes of age." They're about maturity, passage, and developing morally and psychologically. This word, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, is a German word meaning "novel of education" or "novel of formation."

For us Baby Boomers, movies like The Graduate, To Kill A Mockingbird and Rebel Without a Cause are examples of this literary genre. Some of my other favorite coming-of-age films include: Dead Poets Society, The Breakfast Club, Stand By Me, and most recently Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom.

We all have a personal story, we're living it, and sort of making it up as we go. No doubt you remember a version of your first coming-of-age. Maybe it centered around puberty, or a religious event, or a rite of passage like the new found freedom of a driver's license. Maybe it came through a trial of some kind: losing someone close to you, a loss of innocence--something that required you to grow up fast.

Today there is a state or condition called "teen angst". I don't know if it existed when I was a teen or not. If it did, maybe it didn't have a name. In a way, this "second coming of age", as I like to call this time of impending "retirement", has some of the dread, uncertainty, and anxiety that the first coming of age had.

Quote by Donald Miller. Image from Pinterest.

Back to Donald Miller and this whole life as story point of view--Donald wrote a memoir of sorts called, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life. Here's one of my favorite lines from the book:

“Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.”
― Donald Miller

He's right; you know. Recently I found an Airstream that would have been a great fit for us. It was Used, but in great condition at a fair price. I disguised my fear of doing the deal behind a curtain of being wise and discretionary and responsible. A crock of BS, as the kids say. I was just afraid. Not that this is an example of a life-altering moment, but it is real. 

There's so much more I want to say on this topic, but I'm getting close to the "optimum word count for a good blog post." So I'll sign off with final words from Donald Miller from the same book:

“Once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can't go back to being normal; you can't go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.” ― Donald Miller

P.S.: I highly recommend you watch the movie, Stranger Than Fiction, with Will Ferrell and Dustin Hoffman. It's a great movie about life-as-story.

Branching Out

I am not a dendrologist or an arborist. Heck, I'm not even a genealogist. But if this blog proves anything, it proves I'm not afraid to talk about stuff I know little about.

Several years and houses ago, we lived in a house that had an apricot tree in the backyard. It was pointed out to us that this was a special apricot tree--half the tree produced freestone apricots and the other half clingstone. I pretended I knew what the person was talking about with a surprised look and a "Really?!" 

If you're botany-challenged like me, the seed in the middle of apricots and their cousin the peach is called a stone. Sometimes the fruit clings to the stone, sometimes it doesn't--it's "free." Apparently our special tree was the result of a "graft" of two varieties.

Wouldn't family trees be more interesting if we could graft branches and twigs together? Like I said, I'm no expert, but it seems to me like this happens all the time, with wonderful results. When it does, people say things like, "He or she is like family to us." What a beautiful thing that our "trees" can branch outside the biological ties that bind.

I've always enjoyed watching basketball. I especially enjoy women's games because it seems that there's more finesse, strategy, and teamwork involved. Over the past few years, we've followed the women's team at Oklahoma Baptist University. It didn't happen randomly. Our two grand-girls live near OBU, their Daddy teaches there.

"Sisters" Harper, Allie, Karlee

At OBU they have a tradition (in fact they seem to have hundreds of traditions) where families "adopt" one of the players. So four years ago, our son and his family adopted an incoming freshman from Houston named Allie. Allie didn't really need more family. Turns out she has a wonderful family back in Houston. But somehow when you graft branches together it takes nothing away from either tree, but results in something that enriches everyone.

Not only has this provided an opportunity to watch and cheer for this spunky, speedy guard and her teammates, but it has been so fun to watch the grafted relationship of two families become something, well, special. 

Allie is a senior now, wrapping up a very successful season with this team that could contend for a national championship. But more importantly she is a joy and someone very special to my grand-girls and their parents and therefore to me too. Thank you Allie. Welcome to the "family."

#5 Allie Brandenburg (photo borrowed from the OBU Athletics website without permission)

Path or Trail?

IN THE LAST POST, A Baron, Fried Chicken & Trailblazing, I quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."

A little background refresher: remember Emerson was a good friend and mentor to Henry David Thoreau. It was on Emerson's land near Walden Pond where Thoreau lived his two year, two month and two day experiment in roughing it for self-reliance sake. As a result, we have Thoreau's book Walden--one of my favorites. Here's an abridged line from the book:

"I went into the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life... to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived".

Maybe this adventure was inspired partly because of his mentor's talk of paths and trails. Maybe it was partly because of his own observation that "most men lead lives of quiet desperation."

In that last post I mentioned a few things I hoped people might say about me, if they say anything at all... someday... One of the things I don't want them to say is "he lead a life of quiet desperation." Let me clear something up: my objective in life is not to live in such a way that people will have good things to say at my funeral. Hopefully that will just be the honest summary of the reflection, sprinkled with a dash of our tendency to remember the newly departed a little better than they were. (Okay so you can add, "and he was cynical.")

While we're clearing things up, please don't assume that I count my life to this point as hollow and desperate just because I'm intrigued about trailblazing. At this point, I take a look back and say, (with all humility of course) "So far; so good." In fact as I look back and count my blessings I can even say, in the words of my friend Grady Nutt, "So good; so far."

Back to this whole Trail (slash) Path thing. I researched (googled) the difference between the two and found this:

Definition

"A path is a trail in which all vertices (except perhaps the first and last ones) are distinct. It seems at first glance that a path could also be defined as a walk in which all vertices (except perhaps the first and last ones) are distinct.
By this definition it would appear that a path is automatically a trail, because if an edge were to be retraced in any walk, then the vertices at either end of it would necessarily be visited more than once. However, under this looser definition, the walk u→v→u for two adjacent vertices u and v, for example, would fit the definition of a path, and therefore be a cycle. But such a walk is not a trail, as the edge uv would be traversed twice. Hence the insistence that a path is a type of trail." http://www.proofwiki.org/wiki/Definition:Path_(Graph_Theory)

What the What?

I guess we're on our own to decide the difference and get at what Emerson was saying.

In the last post, I mentioned that I had an issue or two with Ralph's rhetoric. Here's my main objection. He seems to be implying that there is only one trail and one path. I hope he's wrong. I think I can prove he is.

We'll take up there in the next post I'll call: "WHERE IS Ralph WALDO Emerson?"

TO BE CONTINUED... 

A Baron, Fried Chicken & Trailblazing

There were two of us "souls" on this twin-engine Beechcraft Baron, the pilot and me. The pilot was my dear friend Steve--an excellent pilot by the way; thank God. We had just taken off from Boise, Idaho, headed for Portland, Oregon. The air-traffic controller comes on the radio and says something like, "I'll be losing radio contact with you for awhile, give me your vital information." So Steve says, "There are two souls on board." and gives our names, the phone numbers of our next-of-kin, etc.

We're over the Rockies, presumably, the clouds are so thick you can't see tomorrow. Then Steve says, "That's not good!"

Two people you never want to hear that from: your pilot and your doctor.

The crisis involved the plane's wings and props beginning to ice up. Long story; happy ending. After all, I'm sitting here typing this on a lovely Saturday morning with a good cup of coffee.

There are those moments for us "men of a certain age" when we wonder what kind of mark we're leaving. Not to sound morbid (and for the record, I'm feeling great), but one of these days, when your funeral is over and family and friends are back at the church eating fried chicken, potato salad and German chocolate cake. What will they talk about?

He was funny. He talked a good game. He was rather arrogant and self-obsessed; after all who writes a blog 'all ABOUT me' other than the Pioneer Woman and young, hipster women who post pictures of their cats and their food?

Worse yet, what if the only thing they talk about is how good the chicken is?

So, what would I want people to say? I've given that some thought. It's a work in progress, but so far I have this: He was funny. He loved his family and they knew it. He spoiled his grand-girls so rotten they now all have blogs with huge followings, where they post a lot of selfies. And, he was a trail-blazer.

My inspiration for this new vision is this line from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Let me say right now, I love the sentiment in this, but I have a few issues with Ralph's rhetoric. More on that in the next post.

To be continued...