Green Lights
“I have a lot of proof that the world is conspiring to make me happy.”
The above quote was in the very beginning of Green Lights, and as soon as I heard it, I knew this story was going to stick with me for a long time.
Mathew McConaughey’s memoir, Green Lights, was a wildly pleasant surprise, and I’m currently recommending/demanding that everyone listen to the audio version, and buy the book so you can see the pictures and highlight or tab some amazing quotes and excerpts. I really wasn’t looking to read or listen to his book, because I was expecting more of a gossip/”look-at-me” story, but what I got was a lot of passion, inspiration, wisdom, and humor.
I started listening to his memoir when I couldn’t find anything that I wanted to listen to during my walk. It kept popping up under recommended, so I figured, “What the heck,” and gave it a go. Next thing I knew, I had unintentionally walked 7 miles as I had completely lost myself in his life and adventurous storytelling. At one point I couldn’t even walk because I was laughing so hard!
It goes without saying that McConaughey’s downhome warm and friendly Texan voice was also a big draw (move over Tom Hanks, McConaughey is my new favorite narrator).
Seriously y’all…Do yourself a favor and listen to his memoir now!
Synopsis: 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.
It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights—and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too.
Good luck.
