#25 Reflections: 3 Lessons I Learnt From A Book About Stories

This is my extended review of the book — A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller.

This is my extended review of the book — A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller.

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A Million Miles in a Thousand Years was one of my favorite books of 2021. It was one of those book I picked up without much expectation but ended up falling in love with.

It follows the (true) story of Donald Miller, an author of a best-selling memoir whose life kind of stopped after it. He ‘went into a funk’, sleeping all day and just trying to avoid life.

But then 2 film producers approached him about making his memoir into a movie. And as they start structuring his life from the memoir into something for the big screen, he realizes his own life needed some editing. With that we follow his journey of him trying to rewrite his actual life into a better story.

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The story sounds so random, but it was a beautiful read. At one moment I was tearing up and the next I was snorting with laughter. He was a character you could not help rooting for. There was something genuine and raw in the way he writes that its hard not to.

But apart from his story being awesome, it’s a book to take many lessons from. I think that’s why I enjoyed it so much.

The main moral of his story was to make life happen for you and not let life happen to you. Miller’s story is of one where he decides to no longer let life just happen to him and he shows the reader how.

Most times we just let life pass by us. Days merge into one another and before we know it, we’ve finished school, university, and then soon approaching retirement. We are not particularly content or enjoying this journey of life. But rather than changing anything we’re more content sitting on our couches, watching and reading about other fictional characters go through epic lives.

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Three lessons I took away from the book:

1. See life as a story —

Good stories, the stories that stick with us involve conflict, change and growth. It involves characters being forced to do things they don’t want to but are worth something in the end.

If you watched a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for years to get it, you wouldn’t cry at the end when he drove off the lot, testing the windshield wipers. You wouldn’t tell your friends you saw a beautiful movie or go home and put a record on to think about the story you’d seen. The truth is, you wouldn’t remember that movie a week later, except you’d feel robbed and want your money back. Nobody cries at the end of a movie about a guy who wants a Volvo.

But we spend years actually living those stories, and expect our lives to be meaningful. The truth is, if what we choose to do with our lives won’t make a story meaningful, it won’t make a life meaningful either.

So what story do you want to live?

2. Adversary is your friend

Whenever we are faced with a challenge, with hardships, all we can wonder is how to get away from it. How to remove them from our lives and never encounter them again.

But we forget that the stories that are the most loved, are the stories where our characters have the greatest trails to overcome. The greater the trail overcome, the greater the story.

Think about the story of Yusuf (as) — how would he have ever become the minister of one of the greatest nations of his time, if his brothers did not despise him and try to kill him by throwing him in the well.

Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in. We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller.

At a moment of hardship and pain, remember that this means with certainty something great is about to happen and embrace the hardship.

3. Write your own story

As Muslims and children from immigrant families, we tend to be very comfortable with the mediocre lives we have. It’s very common to hear phrases like ‘this is what is written for us’, ‘nothing is in our hands’, ‘i’m putting my trust in Allah’s plan’, etc. as an explanation for the dissatisfied lives we lead.

This is all true. But what we forget is that nothing will change in our lives if we do not take steps to create the change.

‘Allah does not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves’. (13:11)

We need to take the steps to write the story we want and not sit back and be complacent. We need to put our trust in Allah and His plan and at the same time, tie our camel.

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Leaving you with a final quote —

I’ve wondered, though, if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don’t want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgment. We don’t want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breathe and face conflict with courage. And if life isn’t remarkable, then we don’t have to do any of that; we can be unwilling victims instead of grateful participants.