Other people’s stories are greater.

This is not to say that your story is bad or underwhelming. Quite the opposite, actually. Your unfinished tale is a remarkable, idiosyncratic masterpiece, a collection of light and color, wildfires and new growth. No one’s story should be more meaningful to you than your own manuscript, raw and teeming with everything yet to be written. It is
the result of your plot and the seeds of your lore. It is the sum of your parts, from your highest peaks to your most shameful abysses (“abysses” sounds weird to me, but I like it). However, it’s easy to get lost there and forget to find your way back out. If you barricade yourself within your walls, you’ll find it’s all you have: your own limited experience and subsequent perspective.

There are countless more lights and colors swirling around you, around me, around us. Most live behind masks sculpted of small talk, head nods, and little waves. (I find myself doing the ol’ smirk-and-nod most often). Simple. Civilized. Safe. This is not a flaw. It’s opportunity. Life, I believe, is about breaking through, and doing so doesn’t require grand gestures. Human connection is most often found in the little moments. Curiosity, conversation, and compassion.

It is only when we remove ourselves from the center of the universe that we see how beautiful the stars truly are.

This isn’t a lesson I’ve learned and now get to preach (insert absurd laughter). This is a powerful truth I’ve learned, forgotten, relearned, fumbled, and forgotten again. I’ve wrestled with it and denied it. At times, it comes to me effortlessly, its fruits bountiful without my having to tend anything, and other times I knowingly turn a blind eye to its beckoning.

My story. My perspective. My preferences. My convenience. My morals. My beliefs. My control. And that’s natural. Our greatest instinct is self-preservation. But when looking for the line between safety and selfishness, I usually find it somewhere behind myself.

Throughout my life, I’ve learned piece by piece that my story may be the most vital, but it pales against the infinite library all around. Comparison is not only the thief of joy but of fellowship. With each reminder, I set myself free a little more. The chrysalis continues cracking, and I continue transforming into the best version of myself. It not only gets easier, but I crave that moment—that beautiful, otherworldly connection—that transcends “normal” life. This lesson will take the rest of my life, and in truth, it’s too big to ever fully comprehend, but I live to explore that which is beyond me.

Sonder.

This is where my favorite word comes into play: Sonder (I had trouble
remembering it for a while until the mnemonic, “What’s sonder the couch?”). Sonder has become my rock, my touchstone, and my wet stone. It is my lighthouse in the storms—especially those of my own making.

Sonder is “the profound feeling of realizing that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. Each populated by their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around
you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.”
— The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

No one person’s story is greater than my own, nor is my life greater than any one person’s (most of my stories come at the expense of my own humiliation—my fault, usually—and my friends enjoy sitting back with their popcorn or pickles while prompting my next shameful highlight). We are each incomparable universes interacting and mixing and changing.

By sharing our stories, celebrating together, mourning together, laughing together, and exploring everything in between, we can better write our shared human saga. One story.

The backpack.

In Parachute Minds, Gideon Green is an adrenaline-seeking nomad, but beyond death-defying feats, he lives to peel away masks. Any opportunity to create a connection, no matter how fleeting or seemingly trivial, has significance. He is a book torn open—aside from a deep scar down his left shoulder. Gideon is but a drifting
traveler, and if the last thing he does is hear one more person’s story, laugh with them, cry with them, and bask in the rapture of their soul, it will be worth it.

Riddled with scars, a long beard, and worn shoes, his prized possession is the weathered brown backpack he carries across the globe. But its contents are curious. There are no survival supplies, food, or even a compass—at least not one that works.

The backpack is filled with random trinkets, haphazard and jumbled, junk by anyone’s guess. But to Gideon, they are priceless treasures beyond compare.

Conversations struck with strangers are the unsuspecting soils where the backpack comes to life. Each item inside is a glimpse at magic from a previous tale. Whether inspirational or tragic, comical or disturbing, each trinket tells someone else’s story—a meaningful token that, when passed along, can remind someone they’re not alone.

Gideon never knows what item is destined for whom or if he’ll feel compelled to pull something from the bag at all. Most often words are enough. But when he can sit with someone at a café or on a plane, chat with a stranger while hiking, or share a few words before diving off a cliff, someone’s story might just summon an item from the backpack. And who knows, maybe they, too, will someday pass on the memento to someone else.

(deep breath)

And then he gets recruited by a stranger from another world due to his fearless pursuit of adrenaline and the unknown, thrust into training to embark upon the “fourth phase” of human exploration alongside other adventurers found on alien worlds, and entangled in more intergalactic hijinks than even he can imagine.
Extraterrestrial knights jousting at sea, elastic light with healing properties, dwarven gangs with superstrength, and blah, and blah, and blah blah blah. You wanna know what happens? Go read the books!

What this blog series is about.

While I have found an actual backpack that looks like what I’ve envisioned, and while I do intend to fill it with other people’s stories throughout my life, this blog series will serve as my “backpack of the internet” if you will. I will fill it with other people’s stories told as stories. I want to bask in them, learn from them, reflect upon their meaning, and ultimately, share them, because, who knows, maybe someone else’s story will hold something you need.

Until we meet again, I’ll quote Gideon’s signature farewell: May death not find you sleeping. Or in less adrenaline-junky terms, when you die, die living. Don’t live dying.