“Fine,” I say, staring down at Kaleigh from my bed. “Let’s go.”
I bring her onto the lawn and wait as she does her business. My boxers-only decision is looking good. I’ll be back in bed in no time.
But apparently peeing is not enough for Kaleigh, because once she’s done, she turns and starts walking down the street. I’m still only wearing my boxers, but I think, “This will be fine. I live on a little street with almost no traffic. It’s two in the morning. No one will ever see me. And even if they do, I’m wearing boxers. Practically gym shorts.”
So I walk with my dog under the yellow glow of streetlights. The air is cool. The sky is starless. Kaleigh has an unusual bounce in her step. Her tail is wagging. She’s happy. When we reach the end of my street, where she typically turns back for home, she pauses. Looks back at me. Then she turns right.
Great. She wants to walk around the block. And it’s a busy block once we’re off my street. One more right turn, and we’ll find ourselves on Main Street. Still, it’s the middle of the night. How many people are driving around at 2:00 AM? And Kaleigh looks so damn happy.
Fine, I decide. We’ll go around the block.
I start walking. It’s a nice walk. If you’ve ever been outside in the middle of the night, you know that the birds are louder when the sun is down than any other time of the day. They sing their hearts out at 2:00 AM. On this night, they are especially loud. Riotous. So here I am, walking my dog around the block, listening to the birds sing, wearing nothing but boxer shorts. It’s a little crazy, but it’s fine. Nice, even. Unnerving but nice.
We turn right again onto Main Street, the farthest point on the block from my home and one of the busiest streets in town, when something unexpected happens. It’s one of those moments when it wasn’t raining, and then one second later, it’s a downpour. Noah’s Ark–level precipitation. I am instantly soaked.
Now I know why the sky was starless. Storm clouds were overhead.
Now I know why the birds were so riotous. They knew what was coming.
So here I am, with my dog and my boxers and the birds and the rain, and I still have two sides of this block to walk before we’re home. And now I’m on Main Street. It’s the middle of the night, but still, it’s called Main Street for precisely what’s happening right now. Cars and trucks are passing me by.
Years ago, I would have been angry at this turn of events. Angry with myself for blundering into this mess, and angry with Kaleigh for dragging me to this point. I would have seen nothing in this moment other than a forgettable series of terrible decisions, extreme irritation, and likely embarrassment. I probably would have picked up Kaleigh and marched her home, swearing most of the way.
Fortunately, on that day I had my storytelling lens intact. By then, my lens was well developed. So I stopped on that corner despite the rain and the location and my scanty boxers, and I looked down at Kaleigh. She looked up at me. Her tail was still wagging. Her tongue was hanging out in a doggy smile.
This occurs to me: Kaleigh is fourteen years old. She is my best friend. I’ve lived with her longer than I’ve lived with my wife, but I know that she’s not going to be around for much longer. She’s old. She’s been hobbling a bit. She’s already survived a ruptured disk and back surgery. She’s reached the end of her expected life span. This might be the last time that we walk in the rain together.
So I stand on that corner in the pouring rain and soak in the moment in all its glory. It is beautiful. Crazy and absurd but beautiful.
What would have been just annoying and forgettable five years ago is now something that I’ve captured and will have for the rest of my life. Just from reflecting, absorbing, and recording that moment, it will never be lost to me. I don’t know what else happened on that day, but when I see those words:
Walked Kaleigh. 2:00 AM. Underwear. Birds. Rain. Beauty.
I am right back on that corner with the birds and the rain and my best friend. And when I’m lying on my deathbed centuries from now, I’ll be able to look back on that spreadsheet, see that handful of words, and return to that time and place as if I’m a time traveler. At that point, my best friend will have been dead and buried for years, but in my mind’s eye, I will see her as clear as day.
I never expected any of this to happen. In searching for stories, I discovered that my life is filled with them. Filled with precious moments that once seemed decidedly less than precious. Filled with moments that are more storyworthy than I’d ever imagined. I’d just been failing to notice them. Or discounting them. Or ignoring them. In some instances, I tried to forget them completely.
Now I can see them. I can’t help but see them. They are everywhere. I collect them. Record them. Craft them. I tell them onstage. I share them on the golf course and to dinner companions. But most important, I hold them close to my heart. They are my most treasured possessions.
But that’s not all. Other amazing things began to happen as well. As that storytelling lens became more refined and I started seeing stories in my everyday life, stories began welling up from my childhood that I’d long since forgotten. It was like digging into the earth and suddenly striking a geyser.
It happened that night in the rain with Kaleigh. I’m standing on that corner in the rain, staring down at Kaleigh, who is still smiling up at me, when a new memory fills my mind. One of those unexpected geysers. It’s the image of Measleman, a beagle mutt that my family owned when I was a boy.
Measleman, the first dog that I loved with all my heart, who was named after the doctor who gave my father his vasectomy. Measleman, who followed my father wherever he went. Measleman, whom my father thought of as a third son and I thought of as a four-legged brother. Kaleigh has momentarily disappeared. Main Street and the birds and my boxers have disappeared. Measleman is suddenly filling my mind’s eye.
Standing on that corner in the rain, I can see Measleman as if he were standing beside me, smiling at me the same way Kaleigh was smiling at me a moment ago. Long tongue hanging out of his mouth. Panting. Sitting tall on his haunches. The combination of a memory of a dog long since dead with my aging dog of today somehow sparks a thought in my mind, and I realize — for the first time in my life — that not only did my father lose his wife, children, home, horse farm, and horses when my mother left him for another man, but he also lost his dog, Measleman.
My father moved into a room behind a liquor store and was forced to leave his Measleman behind. Not only did my father lose the dog he loved so much, but Measleman became the property of the man who’d stolen his wife and usurped his family.
As I stand in that warm rain, it somehow feels like the worst loss of all, and suddenly the shame that my father must have felt in losing his home and family to another man is my own. For the first time in my life, I look upon my father’s losses through the eyes of a man instead of the eyes of a boy, and I realize how complicated, painful, and terrible it all must have been for him.
Another story. A much more difficult story to tell, but one I will tell someday.
Just as quickly, that memory is replaced by another. Now I’m a teenager, having sex with a girl named Jennifer on the eighteenth green of a local golf course when the sprinklers fire off at midnight, producing more water than I ever thought possible, drenching us as the rain is drenching me right now. The combination of the downpour and my half nakedness have returned this memory to me.
What a memory. I have never laughed so much while naked with a girl. We were as riotous as the birds are now on that night, but until this moment on this corner, that memory had been lost to me.
Two more storyworthy moments, both probably suitable for the stage if crafted properly, but also moments that I am grateful to have unexpectedly recovered. The memories come back so quickly and in such force that there are times when I need to brush them away.
All of this happens because I sit down every evening and ask myself: What is my story from today? What is the thing about today that has made it different fr
om any previous day? Then I write my answer down.
That’s it. That’s all I do. If you do it, before long you will have more stories than you could ever imagine.
I know many professional storytellers, including some of my favorites, who only have a handful of stories to share. I ask them to perform in shows that I produce, and they tell me they can’t. They don’t have any more good stories.
I tell these storytellers that my current list of untold story ideas is more than five hundred items long. They think this number is crazy. They say it’s impossible. I think it’s crazy that they don’t do Homework for Life.
But even if you’re not in the story-collecting business (and you should be if you’re reading this book), other remarkable things will begin to happen when you do Homework for Life.
I received one of the best phone calls of my life from a Homework for Life convert. When I answered the phone, there was a woman on the other end, and she was crying. My initial thought: “Oh, no. Who is this? What terrible thing has happened?”
The woman doesn’t tell me her name. She’s just crying. A second later she starts talking. She tells me that she took a storytelling workshop with me six months before. She had listened closely as I assigned her Homework for Life, and she started doing it that night. She’s calling to tell me that she’s fifty-two years old, and for her entire life, she’d never felt like an important person in this world. She’d always thought that she was just like everyone else — simply another face in the crowd — and that one day in the future, she was going to die and “go out quietly. Unnoticed.”
Then she started doing my Homework for Life, and within three months, it had changed her life. She says that searching for stories in her everyday life and recording them has made her feel like an important person for the first time. She tells me that she has real stories — important and significant moments in her life that she had never seen before — and that she feels that they are a part of a much larger story. She says she feels like a critical cog in the gears of the universe. Her life matters. She tells me that she can’t wait to get out of bed every morning and find out what will be the thing that makes that day different than the last.
It’s probably the best phone call I’ve ever received, and I never got the woman’s name. She thanked me and hung up while she was still crying.
But it’s true. As you start to see importance and meaning in each day, you suddenly understand your importance to this world. You start to see how the meaningful moments that we experience every day contribute to the lives of others and to the world. You start to sense the critical nature of your very existence. There are no more throwaway days. Every day can change the world in some small way. In fact, every day has been changing the world for as long as you’ve been alive. You just haven’t noticed yet.
I hear accounts like this all the time. A workshop graduate once told me that she’s not doing Homework for Life to find stories, because she has no intention of ever taking the stage and performing. But Homework for Life has become therapeutic for her. It’s made her life richer and fuller, so she can’t stop now, even if she wanted to. Another workshop graduate told me, “It’s the most important thing that I have ever done in my life.” Another told me, “It saved my life.” Still another said, “It’s like I can see the air now.”
As workshop student Anne McGrath wrote in a recent blog post on Brevity:
Here’s the most incredible thing I’ve discovered: this habit of collecting ideas has changed something in my mind and how I am in the world. It has instilled in me a sense of patience, made me see with wonder, be more willing to try new things, and look with fresh, curious eyes. The process of writing has become more important than the outcome or me and I feel fortunate every day that I am able to create something. I have stumbled upon things in New York City I might have missed if I was less attentive — an exhibit of Nabokov’s butterflies at the public library, a baby squirrel fallen from its nest in Central Park, the homeless woman outside the subway station who had been a Jackie Gleason dancer. Visceral stories are floating all around us, waiting to be brought to life.
It’s not just me. This strategy works.
There’s an added bonus to Homework for Life. It’s unrelated to storytelling, but it’s worth mentioning. It might just be the most important reason to do the exercise. As you begin to take stock of your days, find those moments — see them and record them — time will begin to slow down for you. The pace of your life will relax.
We live in a day and age when people constantly say things like:
Time flies.
That last school year went by in the blink of an eye.
I can’t even remember what I did last Thursday.
I feel like my twenties went by in a flash.
I used to feel the same way. Then I started doing Homework for Life, and the world slowed down for me. Days creep by at remarkably slow speeds. Weeks feel like months. Months feel like years.
I cannot tell you what a blessing this is. I don’t lose a day anymore. I can look at any one of those entries on my spreadsheet from the years I have been doing my homework, and I am right back in that moment. And I will have these moments forever. When I am on my deathbed, I’ll be able to look back at an Excel spreadsheet filled with moments from my life. It’ll probably be a hologram by then, hovering over my body, but as I scroll through the pages, I’ll be able to return to every one of those moments. Every one of the moments that made one day different from the rest. A lifetime of storyworthy moments at my fingertips.
I found this unexpected gift while desperately searching for stories, and it has changed my life. It can change yours too.
I conducted a storytelling workshop for principals and administrators in my school district a few summers ago. I assigned them Homework for Life. Five months later, at another training session, one of the principals approached me and said, “You know why your Homework for Life works?”
“No,” I said, desperately trying to remember his name.
“I’ve missed three days since that training. Three days when I forgot to write down my story for that day, and it kills me. I lost three days, and I’m so angry about it. I’ll never get those days back. That’s how I know it works.”
Over the years, I have assigned Homework for Life to thousands of people, but only a small percentage has begun doing it. A tragically small percentage. This is because Homework for Life requires two things that are often lacking in the world today:
Commitment and faith.
Commitment that you will sit down every night and reflect upon your day. It’s crazy to think that you won’t give five minutes a day over to something that will change your life, but many won’t.
Instead, you’ll blindly give two hours of your life over to a television show that you will barely remember a year later. You’ll give at least that much time to aimless surfing of the internet and the liking of baby photos on Facebook, but you won’t give five minutes of your day to change your life.
You may also lack faith, because this change won’t happen instantly, and in this world, most people want their results instantaneously. But this process does not happen overnight. It didn’t happen immediately for me. The stories that I was finding and recording early on were not very good. I couldn’t see the moments of true meaning, nor could I distinguish them from moments that might be interesting, or even amusing, but ultimately carry no weight. My storytelling lens had not yet been focused and refined, but I was so desperate to find stories that I refused to stop. I kept on doing my homework, even when it seemed pointless, because I was desperate to remain on the stage, and I thought that finding even one story would make it all worth it.
It may take you a month, six months, or even a year to refine and focus your storytelling lens. You might give up five minutes of your day for an entire year and receive nothing in return. This process requires you to believe that eventually you will begin seeing these moments in your life, just as I and so many others
have. Once it starts to happen, you will find your life changed forever.
Last week my daughter, Clara, who’s nine years old now, asked me to pick her up. It was early in the morning, and she was feeling sleepy and a little sad that the weekend was over and we were heading back to school.
I pick Clara up every time she asks, because I know that at some point, probably sooner than later, she will be too heavy for me to lift, or even worse, she will stop asking.
So I’m holding Clara in my arms in our living room. The morning light is casting a warm, yellow glow in the room. The house is quiet. She and I are the only two awake. She wraps her arms around my neck and holds me tight.
A minute later my arms start to shake. I’m struggling to keep her aloft. My right foot, which has a torn ligament, begins to throb. I decide to put her down.
At that very moment, Clara pushes her face into the crook of my neck and whispers, “It’s just so nice to be held this close.”
Then it occurs to me: I’m the only person in the world who picks up my daughter like this anymore. She’s become too big for my wife or her grandparents to lift. I’m the last person who will ever hold her like this. I’m the last person who will hold her like a little girl.
I tighten my hold on her. I ignore my throbbing foot and tiring muscles. I whisper back, “Let’s just stay like this for a little bit. Okay?”
“Sounds great, Daddy,” she whispers back.
We hold each other in the growing light of a spring morning until she sighs and whispers, “Okay, let’s eat.”
If I hadn’t been doing my Homework for Life, this moment would have been lost to me. Even if I had recognized its importance (which is doubtful), I would have been hard-pressed to recall it years later.
If you’re a parent, you know this is true. Our lives are filled with beautiful, unforgettable moments with our children that turn out to be entirely and tragically forgettable.
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