069 | THE NOTHING (Part 1) (w3w) With Toby Brooks

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Maybe you felt your own nothing. It isn't something, because like they say in the movie, that would be something. It's literally nothing. A hungering void. Maybe it's a need to bring something into the world that only you can create. Maybe it's a need to connect. Maybe success to significance, from daily duty to lasting legacy.

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It is Word of the Third, my reflections on purpose, life, and growth.

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I'm Toby Brooks, speaker, author, professor, and forever student.

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Each week on Becoming Undone, I bring you guests who've dared bravely, risked mightily, and grown relentlessly.

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High achievers who've transformed from falling apart to falling into place.

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But every third episode, it's my turn to reflect, refine, and reprocess on Word of the Third.

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It's Christmas break time in my world, and I'm officially off work today and all of this week. I've got tons of stuff to do and catch up on. I'm trying my best to close out the year with my 75th episode, but after some mishaps around the house this week, that's looking decreasingly likely. At the same time, I'm also trying to give myself some grace and to be thankful for what I have been able to accomplish this year.

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On Monday, I decided I was going to re-watch a childhood favorite movie, but this time through the eyes of an adult.

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I will never forget the day our library aide, Ms. Hicks, rolled the VCR cart into the library and declared that we would be watching The Never Ending Story.

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I'd never seen it, nor had most of my fourth grade friends.

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I was all of nine years old and Miss Hicks told us she loves the music and that the special effects were really, really good.

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Now, that might have been true by 1984 standards, but it's a film that hasn't held up real well over the years on either of those merits.

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While pretty campy by today's comparison, what I loved about it most then was the idea of this make-believe world whose fate depended on Bastion, a kid who was about my age, and it was enough to make me a fan right away. Watching it as a kid, it was fantastic.

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Several years back I bought the Blu-ray and I made my kids watch it. They weren't nearly as impressed as I had been, and I remember feeling maybe a little resentful that they didn't really connect with the experience the way I had. They were pre-teens for sure, and in retrospect, those ground-breaking visuals that had dazzled me as a kid of about their same age were pretty lame by modern day standards. I put it back on the shelf, and so I guess you could say that watching it as a dad was frustrating.

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Fast forward another decade or so to the present, and for some strange reason I felt like I needed to watch it again. A while back, a friend from high school, who I'm still trying to get on the show by the way, Attorney James Eason, and I were swapping messages about life and family and accomplishment.

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James messaged me something that I'll never forget.

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He's a high achiever and that's evidenced by the fact that there aren't many attorneys who have come from my small rural high school.

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And even though he's a year younger than me, he still inspires me.

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But he said, and I'm paraphrasing here loosely because the message has been lost to time, that regardless of what he's accomplished in the world's eyes, there were times where he still felt this gnawing lack of purpose or need to do something of significance.

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Author David Brooks, no relation to me, writes of a similar sense and feeling in his book The Second Mountain.

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For many of us, that first mountain we climb in life is success.

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Whether it's sports or arts or entrepreneurial pursuits or whatever, we try to scale that mountain of accomplishment.

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And in proving our worth through degrees or credentials or material things like houses or cars or any of a variety of other things, we try to show the world that we have external value and we try to prove to ourself that we have internal value.

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The problem is, success is rarely satisfying, at least in the long run.

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So Brooks says that second mountain is significance.

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Now, I'd say I've been navigating the space between success and significance for a few years now, and today I'd tell you that my biggest goals in life revolve mostly around positively impacting people, leaving things better than I found them, and inspiring others on their own growth journey. With that said, I set aside some time, grabbed my laptop, and watched the never-ending story on Monday with new eyes. Not with those wide, uncritical eyes of a child. Also not with the narrow, hypercritical eyes of a father. But through the opened eyes of a grown-up, looking for deeper meaning, in a movie that most of my generation saw, and whether we'd admit it or not, were shaped by.

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Now I will say that I've always been a fairly linear and literal thinker.

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I don't often think about the deeper meaning or the representation that exists in art.

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That said, there were several quotes, scenes, and story points that jumped out to me this time around.

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Now if you haven't seen the movie, and you've made it this far in this episode, you really should go watch it.

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No spoiler alerts here.

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And if it's been a while since you've seen it, it might be worth it over this break to watch it again.

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I can tell you that it impacted me pretty hard this time around, and I'm still processing not so much what I saw or heard, as much as what it stirred within me.

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The story goes like this.

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Young Bastion is a fairly normal elementary school aged kid who has recently lost his mom.

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He's struggling in school, he's being bullied, but he loves to read.

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It's his escape.

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Trying to escape his tormentors one day on the way to school, he takes cover in a bookstore where a grumpy old owner is reading this ornately decorated, leather-bound book.

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The shop owner gets distracted by a phone call and a curious bastion snatches it and leaves a handwritten promise to return it. Once he gets to school he takes cover in what I believe today is a storage attic at his school which at the time didn't make any sense to nine-year-old me because my school had no such places to hide that I was aware of. Here's another part where younger viewers probably wouldn't get the movie because if it happened today his dad probably would have gotten a text message or an email alert that his kid never showed up for school. Dad would have texted kid, kid would have realized that he was busted and he would have headed to class. But in 1984, Bastion finds himself stashed away in an attic. He finds a blanket, locates matches and some candles and he manages to spend the rest of the day and part of the night reading alone with open flames in the attic of his school next to forgotten skeletons and theater production props.

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Ok cool not a bad way to spend the day but whatever.

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So as Bastion reads and sometimes narrates the story we learn of the world of Fantasia which is being consumed by a mysterious nothing. Led by a childlike Empress who has fallen ill, Fantasia's people turn to Atreyu and his trusty steed Artax to race to find the cure for the Empress, so that the nothing can be defeated and Fantasia will be saved.

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Sounds simple enough. So Atreyu is this young, confident, capable warrior. His best friend by a side, or in our case, under saddle, and they set off to defeat this mysterious adversary that they really know nothing about. Sounds like me in my early adult years. So then we hear this.

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A trail in our tax had searched the silver mountains, the desert of shattered hopes, and the crystal towers, without success.

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And so there was only one chance left, to find Morla, the Ancient One, the wisest being in Phantasia, whose home was the Shell Mountain, somewhere in the deadly swamps of sadness.

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Now, as a kid, these place names meant literally nothing to me.

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I don't even think they registered.

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I didn't have a job that would earn me any silver.

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I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, let alone had had those hopes shattered.

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And I lacked the need for clarity that a view from the crystal towers would have probably provided. But Atreyu and Artax had already begun to lose their innocence in this journey. They'd searched the Silver Mountains and they found no clues, something I can certainly relate to in chasing after a dollar. They'd made their way through the desert of shattered hopes with empty hands. And boy, who hasn't? And then they left the the crystal towers, no closer to the answer either.

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What was next is relatable, the swamps of sadness.

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When our climb up success mountain doesn't satisfy, it's not uncommon that depression frequently follows.

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And if not for us personally, certainly someone around us.

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Inadequacy, insecurity, and doubt creep in like a sludge that we have to find our way to traipse through and Either you do or you don't Sadly in one of the most traumatic scenes many of your genetics friends and relatives can ever recall seeing a Tre you watches helplessly as his best friend allows the sadness to overtake him It's okay.

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Everyone knew that whoever let the sadness overtake him would sink into the swamp.

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Come on, boy.

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What's the matter?

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Artax! You're sinking! Come on! Turn around! What's the matter?

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Artax! You're sinking! Come on! Turn around! You have to now! Fight against the sadness, Artax! Please?

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You're letting the sadness of the swans get to you.

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You have to try.

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You have to care.

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For me.

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You're my friend.

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I love you.

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I'm crying! All 18 or so of us 9 year olds in that library that morning, watched helplessly as Atreyu's best friend Artax sank slowly to his death.

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But hey, the music and the special effects were great though, am I right? Atreyu is understandably gripped with sadness. We zoom in on emotionless in the swamp, and who wouldn't have been in a thinly veiled symbolism for death by suicide, his friend is gone. And now Atreyu is wondering what he could have or should have done to stop it.

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He's nearly taken by a mysterious wolf that we'll see later and would have perished himself if it hadn't been for Falkor the Luck Dragon who scoops him out of the pit and flies him to safety. In the moment, it seemed like nothing but happy chance that this lovable, huge, white, dog-like flying creature was in the right place at the right time to save him.

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Now I don't know about you, but this time around, this quote hit me. We've seen rates of depression and anxiety higher than ever in recorded human history in the past three years.

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Death by suicide has impacted countless people that I know and care about, but seeing it portrayed as a bright-eyed young warrior who thinks he has this quest all figured out in searching for money, mountains, aspirations, desert of shattered hopes, or even vision, crystal towers. Only to come up empty handed after all of them and find himself stuck in the mud and the despair of the swamps of sadness. That hit home. But there was hope. My favorite Falcor dragon to the rescue.

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And if you never give up, luck will find you.

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Once Trau is rescued, he finds himself without his best friend, but still with a quest to complete.

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He's in the middle of a journey.

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He's got a long way to go to try and save Fantasia from the nothing.

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Maybe you felt your own nothing.

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It isn't something because like they say in the movie, that would be something.

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It's literally nothing, a hungering void.

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Maybe it's a need to bring something into the world that only you can create.

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Recent guest John Miller spoke about this feeling. Maybe it's a need to connect.

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Maybe it's a need to do less. A move from success to significance. From daily duty to lasting legacy. That's enough for now. I'll finish up my interrogation and investigation of a nearly 40 year old movie in the next installment of Word to the Third, and I fully anticipate that you'll be waiting on Pussy Needles in the meantime.

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Well, that wraps up another week.

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What about you?

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What are you working on or waiting for?

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And what are you doing in the meantime to get better every day?

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I'd love to help and I'd love to hear about it.

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Surf on over to undonepodcast.com and drop me a note.

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For more info on today's episode, be sure to check it out on the web.

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Simply go to undonepodcast.com backslash EP six, nine to see the notes, links and images related to today's show.

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The nothing I'm Toby Brooks.

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And this has been becoming undone is a nitro hype, creative production written and produced by me, Toby Brooks.

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If you or someone, you know, has a story of resilience and victory to share for Becoming Undone, contact me at undonepodcast.com. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn at Becoming Undone Pod, and follow me at Toby J. Brooks. Listen, subscribe, and leave me a review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time everybody, keep getting better.

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Thanks for watching!