A couple of weeks ago, I had something very exciting, even shocking, happen that occurred completely out of the blue. A script I had written three years ago on spec, a script I did as a passion project but which seemed to have gone the way of so many screenplays in this town, i.e., dying a quiet, unnoticed little death, got set up at a Big Studio. Following which, Big Studio messengered a nice fat check to my lawyer, who then delivered it to me at a celebratory dinner with my manager and a couple of my closest friends at a fancy restaurant where Christopher Nolan was at the next table.
It was a Hollywood moment. It was the equivalent of, in a cartoon world, a big bag of money falling out of the sky and landing on my head. In the world of fairy tales and myths it was the unexpected boon. (In the world of fairy tales and myths, it is also the job of the person who receives the boon to bring it back out of the world of magic and share it with the community, and that’s partly what I’m trying to do here.)
Wow, how lucky, you might be thinking. Yes, yes, very lucky. And very, very welcome after about two years during which I literally felt as if my luck had completely run out. So, yes, I feel very fortunate indeed. Especially because, you can’t really control luck. Or can you? Most of my friends and family responded with cheers, screams, “It’s about times” and “I knew it would happens.” But there have been others, of a little more, shall we say unusual spiritual bent, who have asked, how do you think that happened? Or, how did you do that?
Well, as much as I can know (because, really, who does?) is this: What I think, what I suspect, is that it came from what I can describe most simply as an attitude adjustment. A little internal switch in which I moved from feeling unlucky to lucky, from feeling like everything I wanted was out of my reach to feeling like, really, I have a ridiculous amount of most of the things anyone could possibly want, or, as one new friend recently put it, from struggling to swim upstream to relaxing into the downstream flow.
How did I do that? Well, I think it all started with a little gratitude list. Yes, one of those little list of five things each day that I’m grateful for. I know, I know. How self-help-y, right? That’s what I used to think, too. Until, well…see above. And I also tried to start giving more.
And it does seem strange, and maybe to some, pretty unlikely, that something so small can have such a big effect. It seems like, in order to make changes in our lives we have to do something big, we have to make the grand gesture, do something outwardly significant like, I don’t know, start getting up earlier in the morning, like really early, like your grandfather who grew up on a farm used to do. It seems like we have to struggle, to labor, to claw and scratch and suffer. This idea reminds me of a quote from one of the very first spiritual books I read as a teenager. To paraphrase: Life is not a struggle. To realize this takes struggle. But life itself is not a struggle.
I think life seems like a struggle because trying to affect the outward conditions of our lives by trying to rearrange external things is like trying to rearrange the images on a movie screen once the film has already started to roll. Read: impossible.
In reality, internal changes are not only the most effective changes we can make, but are actually the only way to affect our life, our circumstances, our world.
Another friend, a fellow meditation teacher, recently explained this with a perfect analogy. Imagine an archer, in position, bow taught, ready to release an arrow. If he or she moves their body even a tiny amount, a millimeter, if he or she breathes one millisecond earlier or later, that arrow will go in a completely different direction.
This is the power of our minds. We shift what’s going in our minds even slightly (but decidedly) from negative to positive, and we have no idea how big a shift the trajectory of our lives will take.
Why? Well, to lay a little Buddhadharma on you: because our lives, our world, our experiences are a perfect reflection of our minds. That’s why, if you don’t change your mind, but you still try to change your circumstances, or the experience of your life, it doesn’t work. It’s like you’re sitting in a movie theater and watching a movie you don’t like. So you get up, go to the projection booth, pick up the film, get in your car, drive across town or across the country, go into another theater, give the film to the projectionist, sit down, and then can’t figure out why you’re watching the same damn movie.
But once you make an improvement in your mind: new movie starts to play. Then you feel better, and then other things happen in your life that also make you feel better. Sometimes it seems like coincidence or luck, but I’m becoming more and more convinced that this is how things work. And I’m becoming convinced because getting this surprise, this unexpected boon, was not the thing that made me feel happier and luckier than I had in a long time. It was not the big pivot point in my life that we always imagine something like this to be. Not that it isn’t amazing and great and spectacular, because it is. But the point I’m trying to make is that I was already feeling lucky and happy and in the groove/zone/flow* before it happened.
And I got there by working on the stuff I actually had control over, i.e., paying attention to what I already have, and giving away whatever I could. Gratitude and giving. What I think I will now call: The Seeds of Luck.
*Epilogue: By coincidence, or maybe not, the screenplay that got set up at WB is an adaptation of the book Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach, which begins with the following apropos parable illustrating the upstream/downstream mind, or as Buddha might put it, grasping vs. patient acceptance, which, by the way, despite how it sounds, is a joyful mind, to wit:
Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. The current of the river swept silently over them all--young and old, rich and poor, good and evil, the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self.
Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth. But one creature said at last, "I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom."
The other creatures laughed and said, "Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks and you will die quicker than boredom!" But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.
Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more. And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, "See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah, come to save us all!"
And the one carried in the current said, "I am no more Messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure." But they cried the more, "Savior!" all the while clinging to the rocks, and when they looked again he was gone, and they were left alone making legends of a Savior.
It was a Hollywood moment. It was the equivalent of, in a cartoon world, a big bag of money falling out of the sky and landing on my head. In the world of fairy tales and myths it was the unexpected boon. (In the world of fairy tales and myths, it is also the job of the person who receives the boon to bring it back out of the world of magic and share it with the community, and that’s partly what I’m trying to do here.)
Wow, how lucky, you might be thinking. Yes, yes, very lucky. And very, very welcome after about two years during which I literally felt as if my luck had completely run out. So, yes, I feel very fortunate indeed. Especially because, you can’t really control luck. Or can you? Most of my friends and family responded with cheers, screams, “It’s about times” and “I knew it would happens.” But there have been others, of a little more, shall we say unusual spiritual bent, who have asked, how do you think that happened? Or, how did you do that?
Well, as much as I can know (because, really, who does?) is this: What I think, what I suspect, is that it came from what I can describe most simply as an attitude adjustment. A little internal switch in which I moved from feeling unlucky to lucky, from feeling like everything I wanted was out of my reach to feeling like, really, I have a ridiculous amount of most of the things anyone could possibly want, or, as one new friend recently put it, from struggling to swim upstream to relaxing into the downstream flow.
How did I do that? Well, I think it all started with a little gratitude list. Yes, one of those little list of five things each day that I’m grateful for. I know, I know. How self-help-y, right? That’s what I used to think, too. Until, well…see above. And I also tried to start giving more.
And it does seem strange, and maybe to some, pretty unlikely, that something so small can have such a big effect. It seems like, in order to make changes in our lives we have to do something big, we have to make the grand gesture, do something outwardly significant like, I don’t know, start getting up earlier in the morning, like really early, like your grandfather who grew up on a farm used to do. It seems like we have to struggle, to labor, to claw and scratch and suffer. This idea reminds me of a quote from one of the very first spiritual books I read as a teenager. To paraphrase: Life is not a struggle. To realize this takes struggle. But life itself is not a struggle.
I think life seems like a struggle because trying to affect the outward conditions of our lives by trying to rearrange external things is like trying to rearrange the images on a movie screen once the film has already started to roll. Read: impossible.
In reality, internal changes are not only the most effective changes we can make, but are actually the only way to affect our life, our circumstances, our world.
Another friend, a fellow meditation teacher, recently explained this with a perfect analogy. Imagine an archer, in position, bow taught, ready to release an arrow. If he or she moves their body even a tiny amount, a millimeter, if he or she breathes one millisecond earlier or later, that arrow will go in a completely different direction.
This is the power of our minds. We shift what’s going in our minds even slightly (but decidedly) from negative to positive, and we have no idea how big a shift the trajectory of our lives will take.
Why? Well, to lay a little Buddhadharma on you: because our lives, our world, our experiences are a perfect reflection of our minds. That’s why, if you don’t change your mind, but you still try to change your circumstances, or the experience of your life, it doesn’t work. It’s like you’re sitting in a movie theater and watching a movie you don’t like. So you get up, go to the projection booth, pick up the film, get in your car, drive across town or across the country, go into another theater, give the film to the projectionist, sit down, and then can’t figure out why you’re watching the same damn movie.
But once you make an improvement in your mind: new movie starts to play. Then you feel better, and then other things happen in your life that also make you feel better. Sometimes it seems like coincidence or luck, but I’m becoming more and more convinced that this is how things work. And I’m becoming convinced because getting this surprise, this unexpected boon, was not the thing that made me feel happier and luckier than I had in a long time. It was not the big pivot point in my life that we always imagine something like this to be. Not that it isn’t amazing and great and spectacular, because it is. But the point I’m trying to make is that I was already feeling lucky and happy and in the groove/zone/flow* before it happened.
And I got there by working on the stuff I actually had control over, i.e., paying attention to what I already have, and giving away whatever I could. Gratitude and giving. What I think I will now call: The Seeds of Luck.
*Epilogue: By coincidence, or maybe not, the screenplay that got set up at WB is an adaptation of the book Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach, which begins with the following apropos parable illustrating the upstream/downstream mind, or as Buddha might put it, grasping vs. patient acceptance, which, by the way, despite how it sounds, is a joyful mind, to wit:
Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. The current of the river swept silently over them all--young and old, rich and poor, good and evil, the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self.
Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth. But one creature said at last, "I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom."
The other creatures laughed and said, "Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks and you will die quicker than boredom!" But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.
Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more. And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, "See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah, come to save us all!"
And the one carried in the current said, "I am no more Messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure." But they cried the more, "Savior!" all the while clinging to the rocks, and when they looked again he was gone, and they were left alone making legends of a Savior.
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