A Million Miles in a Thousand Years (What I Learned While Editing My Life) by Donald Miller///Commentary by G. White

After reading Donald Miller’s new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years (wow, that’s hard to type all those l’s and i’s and m’s), I sat up on my couch and thought, dang, my life is boring. I kinda think that’s what Don wanted me to think. The premise of his book: live a better story.

After being approached by filmmakers, Don had to rewrite his life into a coherent, entertaining narrative for the common movie audience. He realized that his life was boring. He realized that his life was just a series of slightly related, yet somewhat distinct vignettes of writing, speaking, and smoking pipes.

In the Author’s Note, Miller questions us about film content. If we went to a movie about a guy who wanted to get a Volvo, and in the end he got a Volvo, we wouldn’t walk out of the theatre mystified or satisfied, we would wonder why anyone ever wanted to make that movie. Miller’s point: that’s your life. Your life is about silly things like getting Ipods and Volvos and about making the basketball team and getting that new job, but once we obtain those things, the story ends.

Miller says that most of our stories wouldn’t make good movies or even novels. We need to live better stories.

After thinking about this, I examined my life. I’m a junior in college with no idea what I want to do. To entertain myself I read books, watch movies and drink margaritas with my fiancé. Don talks about how his story got interesting, from kayaking in Oregon to biking across America to climbing the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. And I sat there and thought, well, that’s easy for you Don because you’re probably bathed in cash from your successful books. I have to try and graduate with good grades so that I have a hope of getting a job and supporting my fiancé-soon-to-be-wife. I don’t have time to write a better story for myself. I go to a liberal arts college, where I’m getting a useless degree, I won’t be able to have your illustrious adventures.

But then I stepped back and realized that I’m having those adventures all the time. I’m writing a fairly good story, and soon Hannah and I will be permanently sharing a pen writing on the blank page of the rest of our lives.

Don talked about how a character needs to want something and to overcome conflict in order to get it. That’s a good story. I realized, I don’t know what I want, and I avoid conflict. So my story is pretty boring. But I decided to think of some things I want. I want to support my future spouse well. I want to pay off my debt in five years. I want to go to the Grand Canyon this spring break with my friends. I want to go to Spain with Hannah. I want to move to a big city. I want to go to grad school. I want to serve the poor and needy for the rest of my life. I want to love Hannah forever.

Now that I know what I want, I’ve got to overcome some conflict to get it. Well, Hannah, let’s make it to Spain and back. Josh, Jeff, Jordan, Matt: we’ll get to the Grand Canyon and enjoy every minute of it, even when we’re burying our own feces.

Miller challenged me to write a better story. I’m not sure if anyone will ever want to make my life into a movie, but hopefully we wouldn’t have much editing to do.

The book is challenging, hysterically funny, deep and wonderful. Miller tells the most beautiful, moving stories with his knack for humor, and with mature, yet humble insights.

Avatar

James Cameron didn’t spend three-hundred million dollars on a fresh story or good actors. He spent three-hundred million creating a beautiful, luminescent natural world that we should all feel bad destroying with capitalism.

The film opens up with a bird’s-eye-view of Pandora, a magnificent new world, explained as the moon of some other large planet. Quickly we realize why Pandora is valuable: unobtainium. A fake resource that the U.S. seems to want a lot of. There are references to a green-less earth back home, destroyed by America’s rape of the planet. The Army has established a base and a mining corporation partners with them to exploit Pandora for her precious unobtainium.

Enter Jake Sully, an ex-jarhead who lost his legs in combat. His brother was part of a project to make peace with the Na’vi, the native blue tall people of Pandora. Sigourney Weaver is the head scientist of the project and she’s not too happy to have another dumb gun on the planet to replace Sully’s now dead Ph.D. brother.

Weaver’s character, the treehugging and aptly named, Grace, has grown hybrid clones of the Na’vi with human DNA, and has found a way to mind meld with them. That’s where the title, Avatar, comes in. These copies can be inhabited “wirelessly” by people in coffin-like containers. Jake plugs in and is amazed to be able to walk and run again, and even have blue-people sex.

Then the story turns Fern Gully, er, I mean spy-falls-in-love-with-the-natives-and-changes-sides. Jake is sent on a mission by the grunting, white-haired Army commander to try to convince the Na’vi to move out of their tree village that sits on a large quantity of unobtainium. Jake goes, falls in love with blue princess, and conflict ensues.

Like I said, the plot isn’t too fresh or even interesting. But the world is. Pandora is a rain-forest by day and a fiber-optic glow show by night. It is a romanticization of the natural world that we have, a fossil of what may have once been on Earth. The Na’vi, blue people, are intimately connected with their world. I don’t mean that metaphorically. They can actually connect with some kind of organic internet that “flows,” like The Force, between all living things by taking their pony tails with nerves and attaching themselves to different animals and trees.

The Na’vi culture is an indigenous mixture with Native American leanings. They are a symbolic culture whose destruction Westerners mourn because of careless colonization and exploitation.

When Jake’s peace mission seems to fail, the caricature Army man decides to hit the massacre button. Cameron is unflinching in his accusations of America. Massacres like Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, and My Lai, are something that we tend to amnesiate into the academic periphery of our collective memory. But Cameron won’t let us forget.
The Army man goes painfully George Bush, “We have to fight terror with terror, we have to use pre-emptive strikes.” This blatant evoking of Bush-era rhetoric seals Cameron’s markedly green and blue message.

Avatar is preachy and romantic; the plot and characters are bland; the dialogue is spotty and cliché. But the message needs to be heard. Cameron used three-hundred million dollars to convince me that the Earth is something beautiful and bravura that we can lose through our undaunted avarice.

Drops Like Stars

Rob Bell’s newest book, Drops Like Stars, is a coffee-table-book-sized illustrative collection of “thoughts on the suffering and creativity.” It is a short, yet expansive work of sleek design layout and evocative imagery. Most of the pages have a few words on them, punctuated by powerful images.

One of my friends picked up the book, leafed through it, and said, “This is trendy as frick.” But the lustrous, minimalist design certainly works. It is filled with beautiful images of soap carvings, to colorful Times Square, to a squirrel. The images back up Bells power-packed words. Bell’s previous books, Sex God, Velvet Elvis, and Jesus Wants to Save Christians, have all had similar designs: strong colors and sharp shapes, and straight lines. The space keeps you focused on the few words that are on the page.

Bell’s “thoughts on creativity and suffering” are divided into six “arts.” These arts are observations on the nature of suffering or its side effects. The first, disruption, is when our plans don’t go right, they get completely disrupted, and we have “to imagine a totally new tomorrow.” Honesty is the next art, which happens when people suffer and they have to express that suffering. Everyone feels “the ache” when they hear a story about human suffering. “Suffering unites,” which spells out solidarity, the fourth art. Bell talks about how we can all relate to Christ because he became flesh and suffered, just like the rest of us. We have solidarity with Christ. Elimination causes us to trim down to only what is necessary. This art coheres with the economic situation: Americans have had to eliminate extra things from their lives. The art of failure resides in the human ability to bounce back, evolve, and learn from mistakes.

In a recent interview with the Burnside Writer’s Collective, Bell said, “Great rhetoric has never been about how many words one can fill the air with, it’s always been about how clean and uncluttered and lean an idea can be articulated. It’s always been the short, crisp parable that has infinite layers of meaning that knocks around your head for days.” Drops Like Stars is just that. Bell doesn’t blab on and on for one-hundred and sixty pages. He puts a few strong words on each page and leaves space for readers to knock his ideas around.

Bell also said in the interview, “I’m endlessly interested in content—how to make something shorter, denser, get to it faster.” Drops Like Stars is a dense, short, thought provoking exploration of a question that most never ask about suffering.

Bell says that most people ask why? when it comes to suffering, but nobody really has the answer, even though there are volumes of explanations, they all fall short. So he asks a more practical, fresher question: what now?