A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

Our answer must exist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct.

Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answers to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets before each individual.

We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn’t mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It’s a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them.

I’ll tell these things to God, and he’ll laugh, I think, and he’ll remind me of the parts I forgot, the parts that were his favorites. We’ll sit and remember my story together, and then he’ll stand and put his arms around me and say, “Well done,” and that he liked my story. And my soul won’t be thirsty anymore.

We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.

I think they’d be surprised at how soon their sad thoughts would dissipate, if for no other reason than they didn’t have time to think them anymore. There would be too much work to do, too many scenes to write.

I don’t ever want to go back to believing life is meaningless. I know there are biochemical causes for some forms of depression, but I wish people who struggle against dark thoughts would risk their hopes on living a good story—by that I mean finding a team of people doing hard work for a noble cause, and joining them.

It’s as though God is saying, Write a good story, take somebody withyou, andlet me help.

I asked Steve what he wanted people to feel when they finished watching our movie, and he said he wanted people to feel grateful. “Grateful for the film?” I asked. But he said, “No, grateful they are alive.”

A good storyteller doesn’t just tell a better story, though. He invites other people into the story with him, giving them a better story too.