Meditations on Meaning

(This post is prologue for the Share Your World Journey, which you can follow here on Avanoo)

A young man sits at a café in Venice, California. He is poised to write an epic story that, he thinks, will inspire millions of people to make a better world! Notes are stacked high next to him, and his pencil is raised… ready to capture a moment, a beginning.

But he can’t put the pencil against the paper. Can’t even make a smudge. Let alone write a word. Because he just had another idea: “What if a talking giraffe rode into the second chapter on a rocket ship while juggling the sun and the moon?”

That’d be crazy! And it’d change everything. It’d create so many possibilities. And those possibilities must be thought through. Now. Before beginning the story. And maybe ruining it because every possibility hadn’t been considered.

He puts the pencil down. And tells himself that he’ll begin the story in a few weeks at the most. Which will give him enough time to understand exactly how the talking giraffe – who, he’s decided, is also an expert ballroom dancer – can help the story develop.

*****

The young man spends a week exploring Billy (he’s now given the giraffe a name). And though he now loves Billy, and all the energy that he might bring to the story, he can’t help but notice that Billy has created more questions than answers.

For instance, what does his protagonist – a young man like himself whom he calls Dan – feed Billy in New York City, where there are no high trees. And how can Dan protect Billy from poachers in Zimbabwe, where some people like spotted blankets? And where will Dan store Billy’s rocket ship in Japan, where rocket ships are in high demand?

The young man begins to believe that his story will never get written. So he goes to an ice skating rink and slides around the ice in his shoes. As he slides, an errant beach ball hits him in the head. And he falls to the ice, unconscious.

*****

When he wakes up, he’s sitting at a café in Venice, California. His notes are stacked high next to him, and his pencil is raised… ready to capture a moment, a beginning.

He doesn’t know how he got back to the café, which he hasn’t returned to since postponing the beginning of his epic story that, he thinks, will inspire millions of people to make a better world.

But he doesn’t think too much, because he has the desire to write… to begin the story that he’s spent so many years thinking about… but has had so much trouble beginning. He puts the pencil to the paper and writes:

“Clarity comes when consciousness is regained.”

*****

He keeps the point of his pencil on the paper. And thinks about Dan, his protagonist. Dan’s mission in the story is to travel around the world listening to people’s stories. And to ask those people to share their stories with a growing global community of friends who, together, are making a better, more meaningful, more fun, and more tolerant world.

The young man knows that to make Dan’s journey as authentic and real as possible, he must do something drastic….

He looks at the pile of notes next to him. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. He smiles, drops his pencil, grabs the notes – which he’s spent months creating and organizing, and dumps them into a nearby recycling bin. Then he returns to the table, picks up his pencil, and writes:

“Moments are realized when we stop imagining how they will be… and realize that they already are.”

*****

The young man continues to write paragraphs that are, he realizes, forming a prologue of sorts for his epic story that, he thinks, will inspire millions of people to make the world better!

At the end of the prologue, he gives Dan a duffel bag full of clothes, keys to a hybrid car, a connection to the Internet, and seven peanut butter sandwiches. And he writes that Dan will begin traveling tonight… without any of the extra provisions or zoo animals that he’d once imagined would help Dan along.

“In each moment,” he quotes Dan as saying at the end of the prologue, “life gives us exactly what we need to do that thing that we were meant to do. Our only obligation to ourselves and to others is to recognize that thing, and to do it!”