Pop culture alert.
There’s this song in the movie “Team America:World Police” called “Montage,” which best illustrates how overplayed that movie technique is:
Show a lot of things happening at once,
Remind everyone of what’s going on (what’s going on?)
And with every shot you show a little improvement
To show it all would take too long
That’s called a montage (montage)
Oh we want montage (montage)And anything that we want to go from just a beginner to a pro,
You need a montage (montage)
Even Rocky had a montage (montage)
In the movie that is my life, I feel sometimes like I’m in the montage. That section full of little gems betwixt long spans of inane grinding and routine. That section that’s headed somewhere but going really, really slowly. The section that–when the retelling finally comes–will be heavily trimmed to a sequence of short clips to keep the pacing going.
Take my 5k goal, for instance. I would probably spend the exposition on that all-important first run. But the 14th, the 15th, the 23rd run? The mornings when I have to convince myself to go running? Showing only one will suffice.
Little stories worth telling placed between spans of seasons with littler stories. Something’s bound to get cut.
Everyone does that. Biographers and journalists and documentarians. My favorite memoirist, Frank McCourt, does that. In his three books he doesn’t record every single day of his life. Just the ones where he’s deemed to have a story worth telling, or at least one where he can skillfully tell and retell and dedicate chapters and pages and long drawn-out passages of paragraphs and super-long sentences where he rambles on and on in that often self-deprecating tone of his.
The Bible does that too, ya know. You know how the Israelites were stuck in the desert for 40 years? If we had to tell stories from every single day of that, or from the centuries between the Old and New Testaments, it would be an infinitely longer record. Even the retelling of the ministry of Jesus has sections cut out from it. The very last verse of John gives the reason:
“Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.”
Our lives would fill books, and yet in the retelling, we summise it to a single volume. Something’s bound to get cut.
And that’s the challenge for me. Even if I know I’m not going to remember each one of these days, even if the only ones I remember will be cleverly pared into little clips bunched together with a sweet pop song playing over them. Even then, I still have to carpe diem my way through them. Still play my part to the best of who I am. Still have to treat each scene like it’s part of the story. Because they are.
I wrote this line a few seasons back. I’ve yet to make a song for it, but I feel like it’s absolutely fitting:
“Love is the everyday, the asinine moments of the day.”
I have a vague sense of what the finish line looks like, and I’m convinced deep down that I’m headed there.
That makes living in the middle worth it.