I keep being reminded that I’m not a prophet. That no matter how certain I am about what’s to come, I am almost always wrong.
Something unexpectedly shifted in my life at the end of last year, which necessitated some quick improvisational thinking on my part. Without going into too much detail, I’ll just say that I had to leave Los Angeles until June. With next to no idea what I’d be doing or where I’d be going. But I had to leave town. Six months in exile stretched out before me.
My parents spend the winters in California with my older sister and her family so my childhood home in Columbus, Ohio was empty. My younger sister and her family are there, as well as a lot of friends, so it felt like a safe and logical first stop. I ended up staying for a few weeks and it was wonderful. I was able to catch my breath, reconnect with people I love, and plot my next steps.
But it was also tough at times. I had a lot of confusion, sadness, and grief come up. I was angry that I couldn’t be home. I missed my dog Nelson. I was lonely. And then my friend Kyle Cox said, “Why don’t you come to Nashville and we can record a couple of your songs?” Kyle and our friends Cory Quintard and Jeremiah Dunlap were all available for a month, from mid-February to mid-March, and all eager to work on some music together. The idea of making music with these guys felt good. So I accepted Kyle’s invitation.
“A few songs” turned into many. I brought about fifty original songs to Nashville, and Nelson (I had him driven out to Columbus and he’s been with me ever since :) We whittled those fifty down to twenty-seven and recorded all of them. Half the songs were recorded by the four of us during the days (I rented an Airbnb that we turned into a recording studio) and are more fully produced. The other half—which have a more acoustic, lo-fi, basement-tape vibe—were recorded with Kyle at his home at various nights after his kids went to sleep.
So I came to Nashville with a lot of anger, confusion, and sadness. And I left with a double album, twelve songs on each. I’m more proud of the music we made together in that month than I am of perhaps anything I’ve ever worked on. And this fact is inarguable: If I hadn’t had to leave Los Angeles, if I hadn’t had this unforeseen and initially maddening window in my schedule, I never would have made these albums.
My thought in December was: This is a disaster. But then a few weeks later I ended up in Nashville for one of the most joyous, creatively fulfilling months of my life. Don’t I have to bless all the events that brought me there?
There’s the famous story about the Buddhist farmer whose horse runs away (If you don’t know this story, I’m excited to share it with you. If you do, it never hurts to hear it again :) So this farmer’s only horse—which was essential to the functioning of his farm—runs away and all his neighbors say, “What bad luck.” And the farmer says, “We’ll see.” And the following day the horse returns, bringing with it two other horses. The neighbors all say, “What good fortune!” And the farmer says, “We’ll see.” The following week his son attempts to ride one of the horses, is thrown off and his leg is crushed and permanently maimed. The neighbors say, “What bad luck.” And the farmer says, “We’ll see.” Later, war breaks out in the land and all the young men are drafted to fight. But the farmer’s son cannot go because of his leg. And the neighbors say, “What good fortune.” And the farmer—as you can probably guess—says, “We’ll see.”
It’s such a potent parable. And a glorious reminder: We don’t know how things are working out. Or what something ultimately means. We don’t have a 360-degree aerial view. We crave certainty in an uncertain world. But we’re not gods. We’re characters in mid-story who simply have to face the next challenge that arises. We don’t know how it will all end!
None of this is to say we don’t have agency and choice. I believe we do. Our choices are consequential and important. But the twists and turns of the story are not exactly up to us. What is up to us is how we respond to those twists and turns.
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I’m having a big experience with Donald Miller’s latest book, Hero On a Mission: A Path to a Meaningful Life. He identifies the four major archetypes in any story: Victim, Villain, Hero, and Guide, and takes pains to point out that all four of these archetypes are wounded people. Something happened in their pasts that dinged them up, that hurt and scarred them. (Villains in stories often have actual scars.)
This is a really important point that he repeats a number of times: There are no unwounded people. Wounding and trauma are features and facts of being a human being. It’s the given circumstance of every character in every story. What varies is the response to that wounding.
The Victim believes they are at the mercy of the universe, that they have no say and agency in what has happened or will happen to them and thus are almost entirely reactive and often self-pitying. The Villain also bemoans what happened to them and also believe they exist in a cold, harsh, and unfair universe. But the way they attempt to redress this imbalance is by exerting power over others.
And then there is The Hero.
Miller stresses this point over and over again: The Hero is in no way more special or blessed than The Victim or The Villain. They just make a different choice and then forces rise up to greet and support their journey. And in their quest their suffering is given meaning.
The Guide is someone who has gone on their own heroic quest and been transformed by it. They then see their lives through the lens of service: helping others with their hero’s journey. But we can’t give away what we don’t possess. The Guide is The Hero transformed—on the other side of the journey—who then reaches back and helps others. The goal and point of life, writes Miller, is to become a Guide.
Over two thousand years ago Aristotle laid out the ingredients he deemed essential for drama, namely conflict and obstacle. Even if we aren’t up on Aristotle Poetics, we sense the narrative necessity for this intuitively. A story absent struggle and obstacle bores us. And it should! Great stories are messy, complicated, and unpredictable, fraught with unforeseen roadblocks and setbacks. We want and rightly demand that characters struggle and transform, that they get knocked around for a bit then pass through a set of challenges and emerge altered and upgraded. It’s the basic arc of a good story.
Yet in my own life, when I’m visited by struggle or obstacle, which only happens every single day, my first thought is that something is very wrong, that there must have been some sort of cosmic error. Why is it that I’m convinced my life should be linear and predictable, devoid of obstacle, conflict, and challenge, the very elements that make a story engaging and worth telling? Don’t I want to live a great story?
I need daily reminders of this kind of stuff because the part of my brain that fears and rejects struggle—that somehow believes a frictionless, challenge-free life is the right kind of life—is actively at work in my waking hours. Yet I’ve also gathered enough evidence to know that growth absent challenge is a fiction, that we know very little of what we’re made of until we come up against our limits, that we learn much less from success and ease than we do from failure and friction.
This is what might be called a Terribly Annoying Truth.
We almost universally consider the birth of a child to be a happy occasion. But any parent with grown children can tell you that that child is going to cause you some real grief, anxiety, and pain. Not getting a job is an ego-crushing bummer. And it often leads to course correction and unforeseen opportunities that can redirect a life in marvelous ways.
My rough draft assessment of everything is blindingly dualistic. “This is good.” “This is bad.” But the farther I get from the ‘event,’ the more I see that my initial assessment was way off. All these beautiful things cascaded from the ‘bad’ thing. And the ‘good’ stuff never saved my life the way I was convinced it would.
Nothing is the heaven or hell I want to make it out to be.
Life is dimensional and multi-faceted, a hologram rather than clear glass. All darkness and hardship is shot through with grace, a sliver of light. There is shadow lurking in all success and joy. No matter how mightily my mind wants it to be otherwise, nothing is only ‘one thing.’
Richard Rohr has written that if we have no notion of a higher power as we age, if we fail to believe that something benevolent is looking out for us, we become control freaks. We have no trust in the unfolding narrative. There are days when my control freak rears its head and tries to seize back the reins, insistent that it knows best. But a deeper, wiser part of me knows this isn't true.
I'm now in New York City for a few months. A lot of acting work came up as soon as I got here. I'm working and living in Brooklyn and Nelson has become a city dog and can't get enough of the smells. I'm grateful to be here and also amused and mystified at how it all happened. It just feels like something wiser than me—and with much better narrative instincts—has authored all of it.
What a relief.
“Why Did We Stop Believing That People Can Change”? An essential piece from the ever-insightful Rebecca Solnit.
A fierce defense of complicated art from Jen Silverman: “Swimming in It: Art and (Im)Morality”
“To Mend a Broken Internet, Create Online Parks”: We need public spaces, built in the spirit of Walt Whitman, that allow us to gather, communicate, and share in something bigger than ourselves.
Good Energy: A Playbook for Screenwriting in The Age of Climate Change.
“It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart.” The older we get, the more we need our friends—and the harder it is to keep them. (This piece is by Jennifer Senior who recently won the National Magazine Award for Best Feature Story for her magisterial Atlantic story "What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind: Grief, conspiracy theories, and one family’s search for meaning in the two decades since 9/11" which remains one of the best things I've ever read.)
"Cornel West Sees a Spiritual Decay in the Culture: Vinson Cunningham’s conversation with the prominent philosopher about democracy, disagreement, and how to stay upright in a fallen world."
"Yale’s Happiness Professor Says Anxiety is Destroying Her Students."
Loved Tony Kushner's chat with Kara Swisher on the Sway podcast.
Also loved Helen Rosner's chat with John Darnielle: The Mountain Goats front man and novelist discusses art as labor, the value of religious faith, the beauty of Chaucer, and, more or less, the secret to happiness.
"Why Those Moments of Care for Liza Minnelli and Joni Mitchell Felt Different: Awards shows are a natural setting for honoring aging legends. It's reassuring when they don't try to hide the frailty that aging can bring."
An incredible life: Paul Farmer, Pioneer of Global Health, Dies at 62: As a medical student, Dr. Farmer decided to build a clinic in Haiti. It grew into a vast network serving some of the world's poorest communities.
Another incredible life: Gerda Weissmann Klein, Honored Holocaust Survivor, Dies at 97: Her story was told in an Oscar-winning documentary, and her message of hope and love in the face of overwhelming evil was an inspiration to millions.
“To The Brokenhearted, With Love” by Dr. Jordana Jacobs.
Wanna have a good cry? Watch this young couple age sixty years in one day:
Wanna have another cry? Listen to this: “Two Years With Franz.”
This poetry lesson by Elisa Gabbert is wonderful: “A Poem (and a Painting) About the Suffering That Hides in Plain Sight.”
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