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.
Published: 20th October 2020
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Goodreads : Click here
Series or Stand-Alone: Stand-Alone
Source: Owned
BOOK REVIEW
I do read quite a lot of biographical and memoir novels and, generally, I enjoy learning more about that particular person and hearing what they have to say, but that's usually as far as it goes. I like it, understand it and then move onto learn about someone new. Yes, I got all of that from this novel but I took so much more from this book than I had ever expected.
I would highly recommend listening to this on audio book for not just the fact that Matthew himself narrates but he narrates in his own unique style that you really feel like you are having a one to one discussion with him. Not only does he talk about his life but also gives inspirational messages throughout the book. I absolutely adore the word 'Greenlights'. So often in life, we ignore the Greenlights and just do what we have to do and not see the possibilities of what we could do if we paid attention to the Greenlights.
This book has stayed with me long after finishing and I know this is a book that I am going to go back to time and time again when I need a bit of life inspiration.
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