storytelling, Me.Now.

“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I recently came across a statement by author and performance coach Jack Canfield where he expanded on Dr.King’s quote:

“Think of a car driving through the night. The headlights only go a hundred to two hundred feet forward, and you can make it all the way from California to New York driving through the dark, because all you have to see is the next two hundred feet. And that’s how life tends to unfold before us.”

In 2011 my wife and I decided we were going to adventure our way through northern Thailand to find and attend one of the most elusive cultural festivals in the world: Yi Peng. If you’ve ever seen a travel guide or sales brochure with the picture of a night sky full of floating lanterns, that is Yi Peng. Like all great cultural festivals, Yi Peng has suffered commercialism and cheap tourist knock-offs of the celebration can be found all over Southeast Asia. But there is still only one authentic Lanna Yi Peng festival and it can be found in Chiang Mai, Thailand on the night of the first full moon of the second month (‘Yi Peng’) in the Lanna calendar (November in the western calendar). And for anyone with the patience and willingness to roam through a city that doesn’t speak English, following strangers who look at your guide book photo and point toward a barren dirt mound on the outskirts of town, Yi Peng is waiting for you.

Jack Canfield’s visual of a car driving in the dark is powerful because we’ve all had that experience. We were all afraid of night driving when we first started driving, and we all see it as second nature over time. That journey in 2011 was one of the most rewarding drives in the dark I’ve ever taken. Like Dr. King notes, no great achievement is easily visible from the starting point. Sometimes we have to trust that the next step will become visible only after we take the first step. That first step into the unknown, that blackness just beyond the headlights, is always the hardest.

When you get to Yi Peng, you will see hundreds of strangers gather on the mount with you. The sun sets and darkness collapses around you. Then one by one, small candles ignite and large paper lanterns are handed through the crowd. Families gather together to unfold their lanterns and light the candles that hang at the bottom. They speak their prayers and wishes for a good year out loud and believe they are filling the lantern with the same. And as the candle glows brighter and the hot air fills the lantern, everyone releases their hopes into the sky. And for a while, there is no more darkness. The lights of a thousand dreams blanket the hill and fend off the darkness. As the lanterns float higher and get caught in strong breezes, they are swiftly carried away together to higher altitudes and faraway places. The light fades away and the darkness returns.

What Yi Peng taught me was that we do not need to find lights in the dark before we move forward. Instead, we need to be the lights in the dark that carry our dreams higher.

One of my earliest childhood memories is sitting in the back seat of a 1970s era Ford Bronco II watching cars on the other side of the highway drive by. I remember realizing on that day that every car had a driver, an individual going to and coming from somewhere different than me. For an instant, our lives were crossing at an unknown mile marker on an unimportant Pennsylvania road, likely never to cross again. It was the first time I connected that I was only one (small) person in a world full of people.

On the way to school the other day, my 4 year old son looked at the traffic outside his window and asked me, “Daddy – is that car going to school also?” His question immediately took me back to that rural highway from my childhood. I will save you the back-and-forth discussion that followed; anyone who has ever had a conversation with a 4 year old likely knows how it went. But what I took away from his question was that every car still has a driver, and every driver is still going to somewhere and coming from somewhere.

I have always hated long road trips. Hours sitting in one place never suited me very well. My youngest sister, on the other hand, wrote the book on cross-country car travel. If you ever meet her, you’ll likely wonder how we could be related… until you hear her talk about the future. Like me, she believes without a doubt that we shape our own lives. Nobody and nothing can hold us back if we want to move forward. My sister is a driver, not a passenger. She goes where she chooses, overcoming risk with total confidence that the road ahead will only end where she decides.

Too often, we find ourselves living like passengers rather than drivers. Whether we sit quietly or complain the whole time, we ultimately let someone or something else do the steering. It is always easier to be a passenger rather than the driver: no need to pay attention to the road, no decisions, no stress from other drivers. For all the ease, however, the cost is significant – you only get to go, see and experience what the driver chooses. Even worse, passengers often don’t realize that the drive is over until the end – when it is too late to drive anymore.

The status quo exists because of passengers. Anything you can think to change can be changed if you become a driver. Passengers look down, away or even choose to sleep during the ride. Drivers look ahead, beyond and around in order to get where they want to go. No matter how hard or uncomfortable the trip may be, always be the one holding the wheel.

Lights in the Dark

Drivers Needed