reality leaves a lot to the imagintion

wakeupdreaming

I like the “dearsanfrancisco” name a lot because it has this idea of letter writing behind it and letters are a personal thing. They make you feel involved, like someone’s writing to you & thinking of you. That’s a big reason why I picked it.

I had planned on writing everything as if it were a letter to the reader. But I feel like that got stale pretty quick. And now the name kind of has nothing to do with the blog. Its irrelevant and I want something more relevant. I want it to be meaningful.

There’s nothing wrong with having fun and doing pointless things sometimes but I have a vision for this blog, that it would contain things that inspire. At least mildly. Its not Van Gogh, its still just a blog on the internet. I feel like the internet (for me, at least) is getting to be more of a distraction than anything. It could be so much more.

We’ve been given a gift, really. We have instant access to any person on the planet. We have a medium that connects us to each other almost effortlessly every single day. I feel like often times we waste the gift.

Facebook is one of the most popular sites on the planet. If Facebook was a country it’d be the third largest country in the world. Yet, I rarely feel inspiration from facebook. Hell, I rarely even communicate with half my “friends” on there. Tumblr is flirting with that danger, but occasionally you do find glimpses of inspiration here.

I discovered recently that LOST wasnt always plotted for 6 seasons. But after season 3 the writers felt trapped. They kept introducing more and more into the show and their focus was …lost. They attribute much of the shows recent success to negotiating an end date with ABC. They plotted out an end and the rest of the writing from then on was focused on the goal.

I think thats fantastic. When you set a goal and work towards it, its so much more efficient than running around directionless. And it makes more sense to everyone around you too.

I want to be a dreamer and I want to inspire. Even if it is in mild inspiration in small doses from a blog.

we are all connected

I just got back into reading Donald Miller’s latest book “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years”. I do this thing where I start a book, I read about 2/3rds of it and then I leave it there, just waiting to be finished.

So I picked the book back up today. The book explores the elements of what makes a good story (or movie) but from the perspective of what makes a good life. One of the “stories” he takes on in the book is a cross country bike ride from LA to DC. Having recently driven across the country (and being a fan of LOST) I found this paragraph extra interesting:

On the night before my friend and I rode into Washington, D.C., we were reflective. It didn’t feel like we’d ridden across the country. It didn’t feel like the ocean was two days away. We’d grown into the lifestyle and gotten lost in the story and even, to some degree, grieved that it was ending. When you fly across the country in an airplane the country seems vast, but it isn’t vast. It’s all connected by roads one can ride a bike down. If you watch the news and there’s a tragedy at a house in Kansas, that guy’s driveway connects with yours, and you’d be surprised how few roads it takes to get there. The trip taught us that we were all neighbors, that my life is connected to everybody else’s, that one person’s story has the power to affect a million others.