Summarizing Your Life

I found a reference in some of my sermon notes to an author and his book from Spring 2001. I have not read the book, largely because it is not on kindle. However, I am reflecting on a review and few Amazon comments with you in a way that I hope will make a helpful suggestion for our spiritual formation.

Dan Hurley has had an interesting life in writing.

He is now a freelance writer in the science field. Today, he is fascinated by the way the brain works. He says we need to get away from doing the same thing all the time. We need to vary our activities in order to keep our minds active and creative. I have come across this thought in other writings. Who knows, it may develop into a sermon sometime.

However, he gained some fame in writing when he made his living on the sidewalk. The result was something called The 60-Second Novelist: What 22,613 People Taught Me About Life. It was not just his cheerful yellow fedora, yellow silk butterfly bow tie, yellow blazer, two- tone saddle shoes and his button-down look that won Dan Hurley media notice in USA Today, Wired, Reader's Digest, Fast Company, CNN.com and on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. Mr. Hurley made his name and his fame as a sidewalk performer in Chicago. He started on Michigan Avenue. Here is how he puts it on his Amazon author page. 

I decided to take my manual Remington typewriter onto Michigan Avenue in Chicago, tape a sign to it that said, "60-Second Novels, Written While You Wait," and see what would happen. It was meant to be an absurd performance-art experiment in which I expected most people to squint at me and tell me to get a job. However, like in "The Producers," my bizarro idea turned out to be a success: a line of people formed and started handing me five dollars a pop to talk with them and then write something inspired by our conversation. Within a year I quit my job as an editor at the American Bar Association, moved to New York, and became a full-time 60-Second Novelist, earning as much as $300 a day on the sidewalks of New York. Eventually I started writing 60-Second Novels at corporate and private events around the country. Is this a great country or what?? 

While Mr. Hurley has moved on to new interests, he had an interesting point. What would happen if you could summarize the life of a person in a few words? He made other people think as well. Here is what a few Amazon reviews offered of his book and his idea. 

Everyone's life has a story to tell.

Some of the stories will make you laugh, others will make you cry, and some will make you smile or laugh aloud. The 60-second novel may inspire you to write a 60-second novel about yourself or someone you know.

It made me cry, and then it made me laugh again. Very inspiring and thought provoking. 

I want to share one 60-second novel he wrote for Clement: 

I'm Really Satisfied With the

Way I'm Living Now

Not Happy Happy

Just Content

Clement is 40 years old and living in a dumpster. "It's shelter and I don't feel bad," says Clement. "It's four walls and a ceiling and a floor. The only thing it's missing is a kitchen and a bathroom."

Clement says these last words with an impish smile. His unlined face seems younger, except for his graying beard. Clement has lived here in this dumpster, in a lot where dumpsters are stored at the corner of Bay and Court streets in Brooklyn, for a year and a half, since breaking up with his wife and discovering that he really didn't like the shelters. He's not a drug addict or an alcoholic. "The only vices I have are cigarettes and a little marijuana," he says.

Clement makes his money as a "scrapper." He finds cans, bottles, semiprecious metals - anything he can turn in for cash. He also cleans out people's basements or whatever they want. Amazingly, he earns up to $800 or $900 a month and saves it in a bank account his sister keeps for him. He's not on welfare and won't beg, he says, mostly as a matter of pride.

"I know I could do a whole lot better," Clement says. "But I'm content the way I'm living. Not happy happy. Just content." 

It does not sound like a lot, but it may well push us to ask of others and of ourselves what we are doing with our lives. Every life has dignity and purpose. Every life, regardless of how seemingly insignificant, has a place in the plan of God.

Our lives are complicated, I know. It hardly seems fair to summarize a life in such few words. Yet, I have found it helpful at times, when things become complex, to give myself some time to step back and pierce behind the complexity, for often I am the one making it complex. Simplicity often is there in complex situations, if we just let it emerge. Thus, it might even be a good spiritual exercise for us. How would you summarize your life in about 175 words?

Sixty seconds is not much time, but good stories do not have to take long to tell.

Take the story of Dorcas in Acts 9:36-43 as an example. I will let you look it up on your own. Just notice this time how Luke summarizes her life.