Читать книгу Storyworthy - Matthew Dicks - Страница 14

CHAPTER THREE

Homework for Life

I’m eating dinner with my family. I’m sitting at the table with my wife, Elysha, my daughter, Clara, who is five at the time, and my son, Charlie, who’s almost three. We’re all enjoying our meal except for Charlie. Charlie is not eating his dinner. Charlie never eats his dinner. Tonight we’re having chicken nuggets, and as I hand him a nugget, Charlie throws it onto the floor. Every chicken nugget that I place in front of him ends up on the hardwood, and we have the only dog in the world that won’t eat table scraps. She’s sitting at my feet, watching these tiny poultry bombs land all around her. She stares at them blankly.

I’m losing my mind. I’m losing my mind because my daughter, Clara, has never thrown a piece of food in her entire life.

She’s perfect. She’s just like me.

But Charlie is not. For whatever reason, Charlie throws food at every meal, and it doesn’t matter if it’s chopped liver or chocolate-covered chocolate. It all ends up on the floor. So I turn to Elysha and I ask, “What are we going to do about Charlie and the food?”

Elysha tells me that she’s taking Charlie to the pediatrician tomorrow for his regular checkup, and says she’ll ask the doctor for advice.

“Great,” I say. I love it when experts solve my problems.

Twenty-four hours later, we’re back at the table having dinner. Tonight it’s peas. It turns out that Charlie is an Olympic pea-throwing champion. It’s as if he’s somehow turned them into antigravity peas. He can make them roll from the dining room to the kitchen with ease, and he thinks it’s the greatest thing in the world.

I think he could probably roll peas upstairs if I gave him the chance.

Once again, I’m losing my mind, so I turn to Elysha and ask, “What did the doctor say about Charlie and the food?”

Elysha stops eating. She puts her fork down and takes a deep breath. I sense that something important is coming. I steel myself.

She says, “The doctor said that when Charlie throws food, we have to take all the food away from him, and I know that’s going to be hard for you.”

She’s right. It’s going to be hard for me to take all the food away from Charlie, but I don’t know why she would say something like that. I’ve always been perfectly capable of punishing my kids when needed. As an elementary-school teacher, I understand the value of painful consequences.

“Why do you say it’s going to be hard?” I ask.

She takes another deep breath. “I know that when you were a little boy, you didn’t always have enough food to eat, so taking away food from Charlie is going to be hard for you.”

This is true too, but I’ve never told Elysha about my childhood hunger. I’ve never told anyone that when I was a boy, I was hungry most of the time. It’s a secret that I’ve kept close to my heart, hidden away for decades, because when you’re poor and hungry, the last thing you do is tell anyone in the world that you are poor and hungry. It’s a source of great shame and embarrassment, especially when you’re a child.

But my wife has spent almost ten years with me. She’s listened to me talk about my childhood. She’s heard my stories. She’s figured it out. She knows my secret.

Then she tells me that every morning, when I put together Clara’s lunch for school, I pack more food into her lunch box than a child could ever eat in a single day. Then after I’ve left for work, Elysha comes downstairs and unpacks the lunch box. She’s never wanted to tell me this, because she knows how important it is to me to send my kids to school with enough food every day. More than enough food.

I’m sitting at my dining-room table, staring across at my wife, when I realize that she knows me better than any person in the world. She probably knows my heart better than I do. It’s a moment I will never forget.

Here’s the thing about that story: We experience moments like this all the time. This one may sound special and unique and maybe even beautiful, but only because I’ve crafted this particular moment into a story. In truth, these moments are everywhere. They exist in multitudes for all of us. They’re like dander in the wind. They exist all around us. More than you could ever imagine. The problem is that we don’t see these moments. We fail to notice them or recognize their importance, and when we happen to see one, we don’t reach out to catch it. We don’t record it. We don’t save it. We fail to keep these precious moments safe for the future.

Years ago, I found a way to recognize and collect these moments, and it has changed my life. It’s turned me into a storyteller with an endless supply of stories. Stories that don’t rely upon near-death experiences or unlawful imprisonment or homelessness to be effective. It’s also made me a happier person.

Let me explain. Back in 2013, I was becoming desperate. I’d been telling stories onstage for almost two years, and I was head over heels in love with storytelling. As I continued to perform night after night, I realized two things:

1. I needed more stories. If I was going to continue to perform, I was going to have to generate more content.

2. The stories that my friends initially thought would be great — the near-death experiences, the arrest and trial for a crime I didn’t commit, sharing a bedroom with a goat — are all good stories. Audiences love them. But the story about Charlie throwing his food and my wife uncovering my childhood secret — a tiny story that takes place at a dining-room table between a husband and a wife — that’s the kind of story that audiences love best of all.

Here’s why: If I tell the story about the time I died on the side of the road and was brought back to life in the back of an ambulance, it’s going to be challenging for an audience to connect with my story and with me. It might be exciting and compelling and even suspenseful, but audience members are probably not thinking, “This is just like the time I died in a car accident and the paramedics brought me back to life!”

There’s nothing in the horror of a car accident for an audience to connect to. Nothing that rings true in the minds of listeners. Nothing that evokes memories of the past. Nothing that changes the way audience members see themselves or the world around them. But if I tell you about my secret childhood hunger, that story is much more likely to resonate with you.

Why? We all have secrets that we hold close to our hearts. Maybe it’s a secret that you never want anyone to know, or maybe it’s one that you desperately wish someone would uncover. Or maybe, like me, you had a secret that was discovered by a friend or loved one. Either way, we all know what it’s like to have a secret like mine. We know how powerful and painful secrets can be.

We all know what hunger feels like. We know what it’s like to want something important and essential — food, friendship, acceptance, love — but never to have enough of it. And we all know what it’s like to feel embarrassed or ashamed of never having enough of something that you so desperately need.

If you’re a parent, you also know what it’s like to want your children’s lives to be better than your own. You understand the desire to fill that lunch box to the brim with food.

This is why tiny moments like the one at my dining-room table with my wife and children often make the best stories. These are the moments that connect with people. These are the stories that touch people’s hearts.

The story about my wife uncovering my childhood secret, in the full seven-minute version, is one of the most popular stories that I tell, but it’s not terribly funny or suspenseful or extraordinary. It doesn’t involve a near-death experience or law-enforcement officers or indoor farm animals. It’s a simple moment between a husband and wife that has come to mean so much to me, and in turn to many of my fans.

This is not to say that the big moments, like the time I died on the side of a snow-covered road two days before Christmas (I tell this story in chapter 13), can’t make a great story, but it turns out even these big stories need to be more about the little moments than the big ones. We’ll get to that in a later chapter.

As I said, there was a point at which I realized that I’d need to start finding more stories to tell. I couldn’t wait for the next time my heart stopped beating or the next time I was arrested for a crime I didn’t commit. I needed to find these little moments. I needed to hunt them down. My goal was to identify the small stories that existed in my life already.

I’ve been a schoolteacher for almost twenty years, so it was only natural that I assign myself homework. I assigned myself Homework for Life. This is what I did:

I decided that at the end of every day, I’d reflect upon my day and ask myself one simple question:

If I had to tell a story from today — a five-minute story onstage about something that took place over the course of this day — what would it be? As benign and boring and inconsequential as it might seem, what was the most storyworthy moment from my day?

I decided not to write the entire story down, because to do so would require too much time and effort. As desperate as I was for stories, even I wouldn’t be able to commit to writing a full story every day, especially if it wasn’t all that compelling. Instead I would write a snippet. A sentence or two that captured the moment from the day. Just enough for me to remember the moment and recall it clearly on a later date.

I also allowed myself to record any meaningful memories that came to mind over the course of the day, in response either to something I added to the spreadsheet or something that came to mind organically. Oftentimes these were recovered memories: moments from my past that had been forgotten for years but had returned to my mind through the process of doing Homework for Life.

To do this work, I decided to use an Excel spreadsheet. It works well for several reasons. First, it forced me to capture these moments in just a few words. As you can see, my spreadsheet is broken into two columns: the date and the story. That’s it. As a result, I don’t allow myself to write more than the story cell allows. For a novelist who is accustomed to writing hundreds and sometimes thousands of words per day, the temptation to write more was great, but I believe in simplicity. I believe in strategies that are easy to apply and maintain even on our busiest days. This is the best way to develop a habit.

10/29/15	Jaime and Monica’s wedding: First family wedding ever. So much was missed that can never be recovered. Always feel like an outsider.
10/30/15	Hit the ball onto the first green again.
10/31/15	Elysha is horrified by my Meatloaf Pandora station.
11/1/15	Didn’t connect my work voicemail until November 1. Only missed one call. Kids answering phone. Kids protecting me from phone call.
11/2/15	Started taking yoga.
11/3/15	I couldn’t wait to get to school today to see David and hassle him about the Giants. More than anything else. Crazy.
11/4/15	I went through the tollbooth on the bridge without any money or my EZ Pass. Terrified. Worried about strangers when I normally don’t care. Berated by tollbooth operator. Ticketed.
11/5/15	Taught Clara about the Rolling Stones while lying in bed with her.
Walked Kaleigh. 2:00 AM. Underwear. Birds. Rain. Beauty.
When I’m 12 years old, I find out that Measleman, our childhood dog, is named after the doc who gave my father his vasectomy. Tonight, for the first time, I realize that my father lost his dog in the divorce, too. How awful.
I’m 18 years old, and I’m having sex with J. on the 18th green of a golf course in Walpole. Sprinklers kick on at midnight. SO MUCH WATER. SO MUCH LAUGHTER. Never laughed while naked with a girl so much.
Woman in vet had brand-new puppy. So excited. Wanted to tell her the joy and heartache ahead. Yikes! Same with my kids?
11/6/15	Dog humped my leg at Petco. Woman is less than apologetic. I guess rightfully so. Meaningless apologies.
11/7/15	I prefer to write at McDonald’s because I like racial and socioeconomic diversity as opposed to cashmere and American Express (divorced dad, employee).
Sam emails me about life coaching. Friends divorce. Susan as a divorce consultant.
11/8/15	Faculty hoops game. Same strategy as Pete Dechecco game. Not much changes.
11/9/15	Man gets in line at Southwest Airlines, has moment with me, now my best friend, now trying to skip line, now a jerk, but still, my only friend.
11/10/15	I make dinner. Hot dogs and macaroni and cheese. The only dinner I can actually make.
11/11/15	I brought canned jellied cranberry sauce to my class’s Thanksgiving Day feast and was loved for it.
11/12/15	Megan is so disappointed in Chris. I made Megan into the manager she is today. Mommy too.
11/13/15	I made Haley cry by accident by accusing her of pushing when she was not. Later, kids came to her defense and Stacey explained to me that girls are more complicated than I know.
11/14/15	Clara makes snowman almost without my help. So proud. So afraid that she won’t need me much longer.
Charlie has taken to head-butting me and gouging my eyes out. Considering that he was ignoring me prior to this, I see the violent streak as an improvement.
11/15/15	I hit on Elysha by spending an hour of my morning getting the kids dressed, folding laundry, doing dishes, and cooking pancakes.

By creating a system requiring that I write only a few sentences a day, I was also sure that I’d never miss a day, and this is important. Miss one day, and you’ll allow yourself to miss two. Miss two days, and you’ll skip a week. Skip a week and you’re no longer doing your Homework for Life.

Moreover, by placing these most storyworthy moments in a spreadsheet, I could sort them for later use. I could copy, cut, and paste these ideas into other spreadsheets easily, allowing me to ultimately separate the truly storyworthy ideas from the ones that merely had potential.

Finally, by placing the stories in a spreadsheet, I was better able to see patterns in my life, and sometimes these patterns became stories too.

For example, Elysha and I never fight. We may disagree at times, but even those moments are rare. We have never raised our voices to each other and have never said anything that required an apology. It’s disgusting. I know.

Then one day last year, at the onset of the summer, Elysha asked me to install the air conditioners in the windows throughout our home. I didn’t want to. When we were looking at houses years ago, we both agreed that central air was a nonnegotiable. We had to have it. Then we caved at the last minute and bought a house without central air. I was admittedly on board at the time. I liked the house a lot and agreed to the concession.

But I’m annoyed at myself today for not holding out for a home with AC. Putting the air conditioners into the windows each year is a reminder of how I failed to hold the line on this nonnegotiable point.

The air conditioners also get heavier every year, which of course is not the case, but it certainly seems as if they do. They serve as annual reminders of my slow march toward death and the inevitability of my mortality. Each year I grow weaker and frailer. I hate it.

I don’t handle my mortality well at all.

So I told Elysha, “No. Not today. I’m not putting in the air conditioners. I don’t feel like it!”

“Okay,” she answered from the living room. “No problem.”

Then I stewed for ten minutes. Thoughts swirled in my head: Easy for her to ask me to install the damn air conditioners. She doesn’t have to carry them up from the basement. Besides, I grew up without a single air conditioner in my house. She can handle one more hot day without her precious cool air. I have things to do. More important things than carry four air conditioners up two flights of stairs and jam them into window casings.

I quietly grumbled and groused for ten minutes, and then, in a huff, I stomped down the stairs to the basement and started bringing the air conditioners up, banging them around a little more than necessary and grunting as I did so.

“Are you okay?” Elysha called from the other room.

“I’m fine!” I called back. “I’m bringing up the air conditioners.”

“Oh,” she said, her voice as sweet as pie. “Thanks!”

She had no idea how annoyed I was. In truth, I don’t think she cared one bit if I brought the air conditioners up on that day or three weeks later. She had no idea how I was feeling. I jammed those air conditioners into the windows while stewing in my own petty, infantile anger.

That was the story I recorded that day. Not exactly a storyworthy moment in its own right, but perhaps an anecdote for a larger story someday.

Two months later, I reacted the same way when she asked if I could mow the lawn. I protested. I grumbled silently about her request. I paced back and forth in a huff. Then I mowed the lawn. Angrily. Pushing that lawn mower as if I wanted it dead.

Seeing that same behavior appear twice on my list made me realize something surprising: I do fight with my wife. I just don’t fight with words. I fight by grudgingly and loudly doing chores that I don’t want to do. I yell at her by banging air conditioners into walls and pushing my lawn mower furiously across the grass in neat, even rows.

Best of all, she has no idea that any of this is going on.

This pattern-turned-realization became a very funny story about my marriage that audiences love, and I learned something about myself and my marriage in the process too. My spreadsheet allowed me to see this pattern.

When I started my Homework for Life, I didn’t know what the results would be. At best, I hoped to find a handful of stories that I might be able to tell onstage someday.

Instead, something amazing happened. As I reflected on each day of my life and identified the most storyworthy moments, I began to develop a storytelling lens — one that is now sharp and clear. With this lens, I began to see that my life is filled with stories. Moments of real meaning that I had never noticed before were suddenly staring me in the face. You won’t believe how plentiful they are.

There are moments when you connect with someone in a new and unexpected way. Moments when your heart fills with joy or breaks into tiny pieces. Moments when your position on an issue suddenly shifts or your opinion of a person changes forever. Moments when you discover something new about yourself or the world for the first time. Moments when a person says something you never want to forget or desperately wish you could forget.

Not every day contains a storyworthy moment for me, but I found that the longer I did my homework, the more days did contain one. My wife likes to say that I can turn any moment into a good story, and my friend Plato has said that I can turn the act of picking up a pebble from the ground into a great story. Neither of these statements is true. The truth is this: I simply see more storyworthy moments in the day than most people. They don’t go unnoticed, as they once did.

I discovered that there is beauty and import in my life that I never would have imagined before doing my homework, and that these small, unexpected moments of beauty are oftentimes some of my most compelling stories.

Look at the highlighted item on my spreadsheet, for example. It reads:

Walked Kaleigh. 2:00 AM. Underwear. Birds. Rain. Beauty.

What does this mean?

My dog, Kaleigh, wakes me up at two in the morning. She almost never does this, so I’m surprised. Annoyed too. It’s clear she needs to pee. I’m wearing a pair of Valentine-themed satin boxers, given to me by my mother-in-law (a fact I try hard to forget every time I put them on), and nothing else.

I have a decision to make: take the time to get dressed or bring the dog out while I’m wearing nothing more than my boxers.

It’s early November, but we’re in the midst of a bout of warm weather. I live on one of those short side streets that you don’t drive on unless you live on the street. I know all my neighbors. None of them are the type to be awake in the middle of the night. And it’s two in the morning. I’ll likely have the street to myself.

“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 from 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.

But now I will own that moment for the rest of my life. I can close my eyes today and return to that room, with the morning light streaming through the windows, my daughter pressed close to me, whispering words that I will never forget.

Someday that moment may find its way into a story.

Nowadays, Homework for Life doesn’t even take me five minutes. Today I can see most of the moments while in the midst of them. I recognize them in real time. I have often inputted them into my spreadsheet long before the end of the day. This will eventually happen for you too. If you have commitment and faith.

I give this to you: Homework for Life.

Five minutes a day is all I’m asking. At the end of every day, take a moment and sit down. Reflect upon your day. Find your most storyworthy moment, even if it doesn’t feel very storyworthy. Write it down. Not the whole story, but a few sentences at most. Something that will keep you moving, and will make it feel doable. That will allow you to do it the next day. If you have commitment and faith, you will find stories. So many stories.

There are meaningful, life-changing moments happening in your life all the time. That dander in the wind will blow by you for the rest of your life unless you learn to see it, capture it, hold on to it, and find a way to keep it in your heart forever.

If you want to be a storyteller, this is your first step. Find your stories. Collect them. Save them forever.

In addition to my many other jobs, I’m an elementary-school teacher, so I feel like I have the right to assign homework to anyone I choose.

I choose you.