Living a Good Story

It may be beside the point that it takes me two weeks to read a book these days.  And then only if they are fairly  light reading or compelling story lines.  But maybe I'm living a good story. 

But first the reading.

Yep, I finally did it.  I read the Hunger Games series.  As a friend said it may be the only idea that could ever make me appreciate reality television.  Compelling story of finding and understanding compassion and humanity in cruel circumstances.  It still took me about six weeks to read the series, even if I would have liked to stay up til 4:00 a.m. reading them.

The Big Burn, another Tim Egan history book is the story of a massive forest fire in the Northern Idaho Panhandle and Montana.  Google Pulaski and you will find a tool named after one of the main characters in the book.  It is in part the story of the beginnings of the Forest Service during the presidential administration of Teddy Roosevelt.  When a congress controlled by timber barons decided to but some brakes on presidential authority to set aside public land they passed a law whose inplementation date got TR and his friend Gifford Pinchot to speed up their plans to gradually set aside lands for all Americans to profit from and enjoy.  They added much of what is now National Forest in the American west in a few weeks prior to the restrictive law taking effect.   We often drive through Wallace, Idaho on our way to see the family currently living in "the burg".  We stop at a small park dedicated to the mining industry and have our lunch.  Wallace was almost completely burned to the ground.  Other towns along that Montana route also experienced this great fire some of them never came to life again.  The fire also had an effect on the fledgling forest service and perhaps led to their long campaign to prevent forest fires.

Lastest book read was A Million Miles in a Thousand Years  - How I Learned to Live a Better Story  I think this book is autobiographical.  The Author, Donald Miller, was approached by two movie people who wanted to make a previous autobiographical book into a movie.  They wanted to work with him to help him make his story better. -- it wasn't movie material because the protagonist's story was not interesting enough.
So this author begins to learn more about "story".   He realizes that the elements that make a story more meaningful also make  a life more meaningful.   He tells the story of him changing from being a writer to someone who hiked the Inca Trail, Biked across the United States and started a non-profit organization for mentoring kids without fathers and finding his own lost father in the process.  

He tells aspects of his changing story by explaining and interweaving his life with ideas about what makes a good story.  For example, the book is divided into sections labled; exposition, a character, a character who wants something, a character who wants something and overcomes conflict, a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.

The thing I will remember the longest is an interaction he had with a friend.  They were talking about personal growth in the context of "living a good story" when the friend explained that he was worried about his teenage daughters choices.  His response was that the daughter "wasn't living a good story."  The dad went home thought about that and decided he wanted to provide a better role for his daughter to play.  They decided to  support an orphanage in Mexico and raised money, wrote letters, visited....The daughter has a new role and abandons the old one.  She begins living a different story - a better story.  I have long thought that even when we see people making significant "mistakes" in their lives that they are trying to find some happiness in the best way they know how.  Sometimes maybe we need help to find a different role for ourselves.

So I've been thinking about what it means to live a good story in an eternal perspective.  Probably not the same as living a good story in terms of a movie perspective, but perhaps there are some similarities.  Things like not being afraid to take a risk, like trying even when it seems hard or impossible or we are afraid, inviting people into our lives to share the moments, to make the moments memorable, conflict as part of the good story, trying to follow that inner voice that knows more about us than we consciously know about ourselves, not quiting when it seems like we are so far from the goal ...