A Million Miles in a Thousand Years
By: Donald Miller
A memoir.
Learning how to live a more meaningful story.
From the cover:
Full of beautiful, heart-wrenching, and hilarious stories, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years details one man's opportunity to edit his life as if he were a character in a movie.
Years after writing his best-selling memoir, Donald Miller went into a funk and spent months sleeping in and avoiding his publisher. One story had ended, and Don was unsure how to start another.
But he gets rescued by two movie producers who want to make a movie based on his memoir. When they start fictionalizing Don's life for film--changing a meandering memoir into a structured narrative--the real-life Don starts a journey to edit his actual life into a better story. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years details that journey and challenges readers to reconsider what they strive for in life. It shows how to get a second chance at life the first time around.
Why should you read this book?
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years will help you look at your life differently. When we learn what makes a good story, we can learn how to live a more meaningful story ourselves.
Excerpts:
“I’ve read philosophers who say meaningful experiences are purely subjective, and I understand why they believe that. Because you can’t prove life and love and death are anything more than random happenings. But then you start thinking about some of the scenes you’ve lived, they have a sentimental quality that gets you believing we are all poems coming out of the mud.”
“My uncle Art died this year, and he was a good man. And we didn’t have a lot of good men in my family, mostly because Art was the only one there. I found it hard to believe my uncle would die. He was the only man in our family for so long that he was like God. And God doesn’t die. I knew he wouldn’t die, because his life was like roots of a tree that went miles into the soil and miles around it’s trunk and came up in my cousins, in their faces and their voices and their character. I didn’t think you could kill a tree that big, not even God could kill a tree that big.
At the end of his life, my uncle ran a boy’s camp in Florida and rehabilitated young men the state didn’t know what to do with. He taught them how to work and solve conflicts. They seemed happy and well behaved. At first they weren’t, they were all angry. But my uncle was gentle with them. They ended up loving the camp. Uncle Art died from a heart attack while working out a conflict between some boys.
The thing about death is that it reminds you the story we are telling has finality. My uncle’s funeral was beautiful. His life was celebrated. One day, Art went snowshoeing with his wife at night. The new-fallen snow glowed against the moonlight as though the earth were talking to the sky. At one point, he lifted his hands toward God and recited from the bible:
“When I consider thy heaven, the work of thy fingers, the moon and stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man that thou art mindful of him?”
My uncle told a good story with his life, but I think there was such a sadness at his funeral because his story wasn’t finished. If you aren’t telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died. But my uncle died too soon. “
“The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. If you want to know what a person’s story is about, just ask them what they want. If we don’t want anything, we are living boring stories, and if we want another pointless “product,” we are living stupid stories.”
About the Author
Donald Miller is the author of several books, including the bestseller Blue Like Jazz and Scary Close. Now he’s an entrepreneur helping businesses grow using the elements of story.