Imagine a story. Maybe it’s a novel or a movie or a long running TV show, whichever you prefer. The beginning of the story is your life so far. It’s been compressed a lot, so it’s not too long, but it has all of the highs and lows, and some of the key moments that put you on a trajectory between those extremes. Maybe it’s no Shawshank Redemption, but it’s a good story.
The story isn’t finished, though. It’s only a third of the way through, or maybe half if you’re a bit older. Lots of blank pages or film, waiting to be imprinted with events of your future.
And now imagine the final scene. You’re about to die, unfortunately. You’re the hero of this story, so it’s one of those bittersweet death scenes, where it’s sad that you’re going, but you did so much that no one can blame you for dying. He (or she) had a full life; squeezed just about as much juice out of it as possible, they say.
When you think of that last scene, think of what made that life so full. The goals that you achieved by then, the people who made up the cast of your life, and the amazing things you saw and did.
There’s still a lot of the story to fill in, from here until the end. And it won’t all be perfect and without conflict, because that’s a boring story that no one wants to watch. There will be big problems, ones that seem insurmountable to the audience, but you’ll somehow find a way through them.
And there won’t be much luck. There can’t be. There’s this great list of storytelling rules, written by a storyteller at Pixar, and one of them is that you can use luck to get into a sticky situation, but never to get out of it. Otherwise the audience feels cheated. So you’ll accidentally get into a few binds, but you’ll have to work your way out the honest way.
This is an exercise we can all do. We can see that there’s some connection between now and our best possible future, and it doesn’t necessarily require luck. We can see the major waypoints and come up with plausible scenarios on how we’ll connect them, can’t we?
If we can imagine this thread running through our future, how can we deny ourselves the chance to follow it? We’ve just acknowledged that it’s not impossible, and what is life if not an opportunity to chase those threads?
In the next week or month, we’ll each be faced with decisions that are difficult to make. We’ll see the thread going one way, but fear will push us the other way. We can do that a certain amount of times and just rewrite things to get us where we want to go, but eventually we’ll write ourselves into the corner if we don’t start following the thread.
Make the story you want to make, not the one you feel comfortable making.
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As you read this, I will have just landed in Chile. That means fresh blog photos and hopefully some stories, too.
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