Movies were my life growing up.
We moved. Every year.
New state. New school. New kids.
No friends.
I’d spend all summer long wandering off alone to find sanctuary in some matinee theater or discount movie house in the rough parts of those dying towns.
Two bucks and you could sit there all day. The teenage ushers in Judas Priest shirts never seemed to care.
I spent every minute I could in those places hiding from my new life.
Then the movie would start. And for the next hour and a half, I would be okay.
I grew up in the 1980’s and though it’s not considered to be a golden age of cinema, it was to me.
To me, movies weren’t just entertainment.
Movies were maps.
They showed me what courage looked like. What heartbreak felt like. What it meant to fall.
To fight. To get back up.
I watched with baited breath as Daniel carefully balanced on one leg about prove to himself — and everyone else — that he wasn’t broken.
I remember being haunted by a sad truth in Stand By Me when childhood ended on a set of railroad tracks one summer.
I cried when Goose died.
Those films weren’t just stories. They were lessons. Lessons in life. Lessons in being.
They taught me that loss, love, and courage weren’t abstract. They were lived. Stumbled through. Fought for.
But the movies that reached into my soul, that touched something deep inside of me were all, in one way or another, about becoming.
Movies are also guilty of having done some damage too.
Rescue the girl. Win the game. Get rich. Revenge a wrong. Kill the bad guys. Save the planet. Ride into the sunset.
Movies taught me that there was an act - a single thing that someone could do, to win. Not just the day but life itself.
There was an arrival.
I waited for it like a boy waiting for his dad to show up and take him camping.
It never came. It never will.
In this way, I believed that becoming something was it’s own destination - a five minute training montage that would lead to an inevitable arrival that would make everything okay.
But then I learned something.
There is no arrival.
There is no one finish line. No one moment of truth. No one single victory that will make everything okay from then on.
There is no end. Until The End.
Until then, you have a choice.
There are only two states for all living things in nature: growth and entropy.
You are either growing or dying, however slowly.
Become or wither.
It took me a long time to accept this. My whole life really.
And only when I realized that not only is there not an arrival, but becoming is not one five minute training montage away from completeness, did things change.
Everything changed. Most importantly me.
Become or wither.
After nearly a decade of ‘refusing the call’, as it’s described in movies, I finally accepted and made my choice.
Become.
Becoming is much more of an art than a science. There are no definites. The thing itself is an abstract idea by it’s very nature. Become what? Become when? These are the questions.
So…
Where to begin?
Get quiet.
Simple? Yes.
Easy? No.
It is one of the hardest disciplines I’ve ever practiced in my life.
It is also the most valuable. By far.
Get quiet.
I didn’t know how. So I turned to the great teachers of old and the young charlatans peddling life answers on the internet.
They both preach the same thing and there’s a reason for that.
It works.
So let me be another voice in that chorus, maybe mine will hit a note.
Get quiet.
What does this mean? There are three disciplines that one should undertake in this practice.
Journal.
I resisted this one. A lot. It felt like I was being a little girl, sitting at a table writing all my thoughts in some diary. Besides, what would I write about?
Sure, I’ve written movies and TV shows but in them I get to pretend… fantasize. This practice asked something entirely different of me.
Be real. Be raw. Be me.
So I started small, not expecting much. Ten minutes every morning, I would sit with a Moleskine notebook (I had adopted the practice of using this particular notebook during my years working at the biggest movie agency in Hollywood - the notebook was like a Starbucks cup back in the early 2000’s - it was a flex of sorts and a cool thing to be seen carrying around) at my dining table and write whatever came to mind.
My first dozen entries started with the similar phrase: I don’t know what to write…”
But I did it. First week? Clunky. Clumsy. I wasn’t used to handwriting anything long and my hand would cramp. I hate my handwriting. I thought too much about the practice and wondered why nothing was happening. There was no arrival.
But then, around the middle of week two, I found myself writing past the ten minute timer on my cell phone. When I was done, I had written five pages front and back and had said some shit I didn’t even know that I thought, shared some beliefs and perspectives that hit. When I looked at the clock, I realized that I had written, non-stop, barely lifting my pen from the page for forty-eight minutes. It felt like five. Better, I felt like I could go on.
The transition from ‘I don’t know what to write’ to preternatural self-observations, personal revelations and deeply cathartic acknowledgements of personal shortcomings was remarkably swift. The only magic ingredient was consistency.
I now have dozens and dozens of unmarked black notebooks in my library, all of them mostly full of character shaping personal insights that have provided a nutrient-rich soil from which to plant the seed of my growth in.
Journal. Trust me.
Meditate.
I always knew that real practitioners of meditation were tapped into something. The ones that I had met or known about had a calmness to them. They seemed centered.
So I tried. And I failed. And I tried. And I failed. I have what Buddhist monks refer to as a monkey mind. Easily excitable, on a million things always. Add to that enough caffeine to kill Woolly Mammoth and I can’t sit still for two minutes, much less ten minutes in total silence, much less twenty… or beyond.
This one I was ready to give up on until a friend sent me a free subscription trial to Headspace, a guided meditation app with dime-store animations.
I had tried guided meditation before but never made it more than a minute or two before I would be lost in thought and get bored or restless or disinterested in the sound of the persons voice.
Headspace changed that for me. It is worth mentioning that I have no affiliation with the company, I receive no endorsements for mine. I’m simply sharing with you that after many attempts at meditation, Headspace was my hack. I recommend starting with the basics with Andy as your narrator.
The best ideas I’ve had in the last twenty years have come from meditation. Ideas about movies, about life, about myself and my future have all percolated from the quiet space mediation creates. It may seem counterintuitive that a practice designed to help you empty your mind of thought is responsible for some of the best ones I’ve ever had.
Start with three minutes. But start.
Meditate. Trust me.
Gratitude.
This one seems the easiest of the three but can be the most difficult when life hits you in the mouth.
Yet, it’s importance cannot be overstated.
Rhonda Byrne wrote a book called THE SECRET that has sold 35 million copies worldwide. The entire book can be summed up in two words: Be grateful.
Simple? Yes.
Easy? Not always.
There’s a reason she has sold so many copies of her book in less than twenty years. In it, she cites lessons embedded in scripture and shares modern day anecdotes and testimonials about the efficacy of undertaking this practice.
This one I stumbled on one night when I started what I thought was going to be a slasher film that was on Netflix called THE SECRET. Much to my surprise it was a feature interview documentary about the book. I was even more surprised when it ended and I realized I had watched the whole thing.
It stuck with me. So I began to play around with it. Two months later, I got the highest paying job I’d ever gotten in Hollywood and would move to New York to shoot the series I was asked to create. A year after that I would move to London to direct my first feature.
Gratitude has proven to be the most relentlessly generous practice of all three. It improved my life in every single way. Quickly.
It is worth mentioning that I knew about all of these things for years before I started practicing them.
The impetus is on you to make the decision.
Become or wither.
Becoming is the work of a lifetime. It’s the process of shaping yourself into the man you know you could be — not once, but over and over again.
Philosophers, mystics, and teachers across centuries have said the same thing in different words: a man is never finished. He is an ongoing project, a rough draft, a work under construction.
Start with these three practices. Find your ‘hacks’ that help you develop consistency and stick with them for they will jump start you on your journey to becoming.