During my sabbatical this semester, I have to read a few books for the sabbatical work I proposed and I have also committed to reading for pleasure, personal growth and outside my usual books on spirituality and sports. Thanks to my Mom and I think her sister Dee, I was gifted a copy of Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey. He opens the book with the following:
“I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me.
Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life’s challenges – how to get relative with the inevitable – you can enjoy a state of success I call ‘catching greenlights.’
So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops.
Hopefully, it’s medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot’s license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears.
It’s a love letter. To life.”
I just saw on Instagram that the Empire State Building was lit up green in honor of this book being on the NY Times Best-seller list for over 100 weeks and I can say after reading and soon gifting the book to a friend that I can see why. McConaughey writes with a depth, honesty and vulnerability that pulls you in and makes you consider your own trajectory, missteps and joys. His journey is a wild one where he literally pursues his dreams - heading to Africa and the Amazon to discover why there were in his dream.
“You gotta do more than just love…it takes work, it’s all a verb…life, love, architecture.” He speaks to his desire to immerse and get to the marrow of it…and loving is key and he pushes us beyond that. He divides the book into 8 sections: Outlaw Logic, Find your Frequency, Dirt Roads and Autobahns, The Art of Running Downhill, Turn the Page, The Arrow doesn’t see the Target, the Target draws the Arrow, Be Brave and Take the Hill, and Live your Legacy Now. He takes on himself in such a direct way and I admire that most about him…especially after listening to his interview on Smartless - thank you Craig Law. No bullshit here…Matthew is as real as they come.
He constantly moves through the world trying to push himself outside his comfort zone. “I realize this is what I travel for: to restore my faith in humankind.” He wants to understand himself and feel the world in its depth and in its 10,000 joys and sorrows.
He concludes his memoir, “We all have scars, we’ll get more. So rather than struggle against time and waste it, let’s dance with time and redeem it, because we don’t live longer when we try not to die, we live longer when we we’re too busy livin.” Sounds like a nod to Shawshank Redemption when Red (Morgan Freeman) states - “Get Busy Livin, or Get Busy Dyin…that’s godddamn right!”
He shared during his Academy Award speech that he focused on the following prompts: “What I need…what i’m thankful for…who’s my hero…”. I wonder if I started each day naming what I needed…what I am most grateful for or simply grateful for in my life and then naming my hero and reminding myself why that hero is important. During my time reading this book and being reminded of his amazing performance in Dallas Buyers Club, I was told by several friends to see True Detective Season 1 with him and Woody Harrelson. I was so stunned by this show on so many levels and I am not quite ready to write about it yet, however, the final scene of dialogue is one of the most beautiful written and acted scenes I have ever seen…I will conclude with it here in gratitude for McConaughey, his presence, his honesty and his truth.
Blessings Brother…
Final Episode Dialogue - True Detective Season 1 - Context: he is reflecting on a near death experience that includes his daughter who he lost at a young age….
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Marty: “Talk to me, Rust.”
Rust: “There was a moment, I know, when I was under in the dark, that something… whatever I’d been reduced to, not even consciousness, just a vague awareness in the dark. I could feel my definitions fading. And beneath that darkness there was another kind—it was deeper—warm, like a substance. I could feel man, I knew, I knew my daughter waited for me, there. So clear. I could feel her. I could feel … I could feel the peace of my Pop, too. It was like I was part of everything that I have ever loved, and we were all, the three of us, just fading out. And all I had to do was let go, man. And I did. I said, ‘Darkness, yeah.’ and I disappeared. But I could still feel her love there. Even more than before. Nothing. Nothing but that love. And then I woke up.”
Rust breaks down, sobbing.
Marty: “Didn’t you tell me one time, dinner once, maybe, about how you used to ... you used to make up stories about the stars?”
Rust: “Yeah, that was in Alaska, under the night skies.”
Marty: “Yeah, you used to lay there and look up, at the stars?”
Rust: “Yeah, I think you remember how I never watched the TV until I was 17, so there wasn’t much to fucking do up there but walk around, explore, and...”
Marty: “And look up at the stars and make up stories. Like what?”
Rust: “I tell you Marty I been up in that room looking out those windows every night here just thinking, it’s just one story. The oldest.”
Marty: “What’s that?”
Rust: “Light versus dark.”
Marty: “Well, I know we ain’t in Alaska, but it appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory.”
Rust: “Yeah, you’re right about that.”
Thank you Bill!