"Wait - wait what did you say?"

Though I purchased it more than a month ago, I’m still enjoying the occasional memory of scenes in “Stranger Than Fiction” – a movie starring Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Linda Hunt, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Queen Latifah & Will Ferrell. The movie is about a main character in a still-being-written novel who, as it turns out, actually exists in real life. The author of the novel (“Karen Eiffel” played by Emma Thompson) is trying to figure out a clever way to kill off her main character (“Harold Crick” played by Will Ferrell) but, instead, she stumbles onto a serious case of writers block.

Harold is living a boring little life in a boring little job (as an IRS auditor, no less) surrounded by boring little rules that he, actually, thrives on. He suddenly awakens one day to find his every move being narrated by the voice of an English woman who reminds Harold that he IS boring, and that those around him may not actually LIKE him (and WHY that’s true), and that these things that he takes comfort in and thrives on are, in fact, perhaps holding him back instead of keeping him “safe”. Harold gains all kinds of insight with these little bits of narration, especially after he is standing at a bus stop at the end of his day and he hears his narrator say "little did he know that events had been set in motion that would lead to his imminent death.” (Seriously – this scene alone makes the movie worth renting. Will Ferrell’s delivery of Harold’s response – the title of this entry – is priceless.) It’s not hard to imagine that we’d all listen more carefully if we heard something like that being said about us.

I described this movie – and the idea of having a narration that we all, to some extent, play in our own heads at times – to a friend of mine over the weekend. The movie was not a standard Will Ferrell box office draw, but I was glad to see that this whole notion of running your own movie in your head, or having your own narration, isn’t completely foreign. I know that I’ve been starring in my own “docu-dram-edy” for 39 years now.

Mid-morning on Sunday I was pretty deep in thought while driving alone in the car and the narration in my head was noticing the beautiful wild clover and the barn on the right that I’d been meaning to take a photo of and that image reminded me of the other barn near the coast on the drive to Pescadero Beach, and then I realized that I wasn’t really remembering to focus on my driving when, all of a sudden, I heard a woman’s voice say “turn left at the approaching intersection". This was ok though – it was the GPS unit making sure I wasn’t going to get lost.

Perhaps it would be more helpful if the standard GPS unit dispensed directions of a different sort … something like “little did she know that her life would be dramatically changed by a simple7-word text message” or “he would later refer to this as his greatest achievement, not realizing that he missed his true calling by not waking up just 25 minutes earlier that day".

Sadly, I think it would have to be a drastic announcement for most of us to pay attention. I think that, to a point, our internal narrators (and our bodies) are telling us all kinds of things all the time. It’s only when the narrator gets dramatic that we take a moment and listen to what is being said.

Note to self: Start listening more.