Journey

Thoughts from “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years”

I’m usually not one of those people who after reading a book will openly say OH MY GOSH THIS BOOK WAS THE BEST AND YOU HAVE TO READ IT but people, seriously “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years” is well worth the all-caps and you really SHOULD read it.

In one of my previous posts I wrote a story, which really broke down my life up until that point but Donald Miller takes the idea of “story” to a whole new level. He challenges readers to look at themselves as characters and God as the Writer. It’s no secret that humans like to have control and we use all kinds of ways to put our lives into manageable little bits and pieces to make it easier to control (different colors used in your planner for different things, to-do lists, Aderol). But Don would argue that this is not the best story to live. There’s a good chance Eden will not be restored with correct use of planners and PDAs.

In this book, Don explains how challenges he decided to take part in drastically altered his story and how if he had chosen not to take part in these challenges, he would have been so totally different. He was a couch potato before and felt like he was living for nothing but the next episode of NCIS. He biked across the country and felt like he was living for something greater than himself, like his neighbor and being a part of the bettering of the world.

Now this could be just the ENFP personality in me but I can see a huge difference in my attitude and overall well-being when there’s action and activity going on in my life and when I’ve been doing the same thing everyday for a few weeks. When I sense monotony, I get restless (and sometimes stupid) and want to do something reckless (hense, the something stupid) otherwise I fear my sanity will be  Khattam-shud (name that book!). But I don’t want this feeling of needing action to be just an act of desperation but more of a consistent attitude. Sometimes I feel like there’s something missing if some catastrophe isn’t  happening in my life and I hate that for two reasons; 1. it makes me paranoid 2. it’s much nicer to be proactive about your inciting incident rather than waiting for it to slap you in the face (although sometimes it’s unavoidable).

Something else I pulled from this book was Don’s interview with Susan Isaacs (author of “Angry Conversations with God”, another book you should go out and read). She stated in regards to her husband and her marriage “she had married a guy, and he was just a guy. He wasn’t going to make all her problems go away, because he was just a guy. And that freed her to really love him as a guy, not as an ultimate problem solver.” This resonated so much with me because I confess that alot of times I put that pressure on my boyfriend and that’s definitely not fair and I know that a lot of the reasons I love him is because he’s not perfect.

I could go on for days about what I’ve taken from this book but to spare you all, I’ll save that for another day.

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