The secret life of
Sana and I watched The Secret Life of Walter Mitty last night. My mom had been raving about it for awhile, so we decided to finally check it out.
Walter Mitty (the character) is about as mundane as you can get. Never been anywhere, never done anything. He can’t even muster up the nerve to talk to the pretty girl at work he likes; he instead signs up for an internet dating site to make contact with her.
But Walter has fantasies. All. The. Time.
Fantasies of doing incredible feats of heroic and epic proportions. He saves his woman’s dog from a burning building, only for the show to return to reality where he’s missed his train because of his daydreaming. These go on and one, much to the annoyance of his coworkers and family.
But then Walter is pushed to his limit. He’s about to get fired from his job unless he can find the negative for a photo sent to him by an adventurous photographer hired by the magazine – and no one ever knows where he is because of his itinerant lifestyle.
He gets a tip that the photographer is in Greenland, so he books the next flight to Greenland. This leads him to Iceland, then to Afghanistan via Nepal. Along the way he fights sharks, jumps into volcanoes, climbs Mt. Everest and then back to boring old America.
And wouldn’t you know it, once all this happens the daydreams cease. He gets the girl (minus the dating site) and finds contentment in his once mundane surroundings.
The thing about Walter is that he just went and did. He didn’t know how everything would work out; he just acted.
Of course this is a Hollywood movie; everything is sort of foreordained to work out in that scenario. But there’s a lot we can take away from that scripted show.
I personally haven’t fought any sharks or dove into erupting volcanoes doing my podcasts over the years. I HAVE been able to talk to some pretty cool people I’d never otherwise get the chance to talk to, even call my friends, if I hadn’t taken the actions necessary to just get going back in 2015.
And as much as I love doing my own shows, I also CRAVE opportunities to share what I’ve learned with others by helping launch or produce others’ shows. Or audiobooks. Or building a highly-personalized website.
It’s telling stories after all. Even the most mundane stories are worth sharing; they oftentimes are more worthy of our attention than the over the top shenanigans in those movies anyway.
If you have a story to share, and want some assistance with all those fancy schmancy internet tools available to do so, it’s what we do and we do it rather well.
Check us out at this link to get going! https://jns.media