What is the allegory for a good life? Is it an airplane that flies high into the sky? Or what about a garden that needs seeds, seasons, tending, and harvest? What about Chess? Strategy, opposition, and moving pieces that tell a story of intelligence and defeating your enemies?
We gravitate towards allegory because we are storytelling creatures. This process is for Nick Ovalle, the writer and author of this upcoming book, to sharpen his mind and focus and to spend his remaining time on earth to inspire narrative change in the minds of millions of people. For Nick, the allegory is a camera.
Ever since growing up, I have had an affinity for movies. It was one of the few things my father and I would do together. Sure, there was yard work, woodwork, building with our hands, and fixing toilets and a/c units. But the leisure time made me feel like a little slice of heaven was on this side of eternity. One of the first movies I remember watching was Scrooged with Bill Murray. It was fascinating because it felt like a documentary. I instinctively knew how to make a move at the age of 5 because of that film. My dad and I would watch other movies together. Later, in high school, I fell in love with photography, poetry, and art.
The camera became a focal point of my life. Taking photos, making videos, exploring the internet for resources, and filmmaking techniques. I soon realized that all the technical aspects of filmmaking would be for nothing if there weren’t a good script—a good story.
At the start of my marketing career, I realized a script was happening in my head. A soundtrack, a narration of who I am.
This internal narrative gave me an identity, values, and self-worth. The influences on my script were the good times, the broken relationships, the disappointments in life, the religious stories, and the pop culture of my time.
We all have a story, and I aimed to hack my internal narrative. I didn’t want to take the long road; I wanted a shortcut, and like all characters in movies who take shortcuts, I fell into another world of narrative psychology. I felt like Alice stepping through the looking-glass and being met with weird, wonderful, and challenging science to sift through.
This writing may never be published, but I think it is wise to write the first draft of this project publicly.
Some questions and ponderings for my exploration:
- What impact does breathwork have on our story (internal locus of control)?
- James Nestor’s Book Breathe has some great resources to dig through. 😉
- Is work the biggest part of our life and story? What is it about working well that our society has missed?
- John Mark Comer’s Garden City has some religious philosophy to help answer.
- Slow Productivity by Cal Newport is an excellent overview of the fundamental shift of knowledge work and its coming into its form of work out of the shadow of the Industrial Revolution.
- 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman gives a humorous and humane way of breaking the news that you’ve been lied to about work.
- Why do relationships, family, friendships, and working relationships feel so hard?
- The theory of the relational fabric of society is found in Adlerian psychology.
- The education system of the Industrial Revolution taught conformity, not critical thinking.
- Paradoxical living is necessary, but many people have never learned to deal with personal, relational, or work-related tensions.
- Why have the institutions of old failed us in our modern context?
- Hyper-individualization as a ripping of the fabric of society
- Leadership lost its nerve and sought quick fixes instead of systematic solutions.
- Deep work is at a premium because of education, the mass adoption of social technologies, subversive marketing, and the post-World War 2 economies of scale.