A Beautiful Anarchy. David DuChemin

with it, we will—or there’s a good chance the work isn’t worth the effort. I’m not saying it’s always this way, I’m just saying that’s the way it seems to be most of the time. Our art is only worth as much as it cost us.

      Living a great story is much harder than watching a great story, but it’s why we watch at all. The great movies steel our nerves and give us hope. They remind us that no story worth the telling, or the living, comes without conflict and struggle; they remind us that the necessary price we pay is transformation. The promise of any great story is that the hero never returns the same. Story is not about entertainment. It’s about change, and it is change that makes us the artists—the humans—that we are and gives us the place from which we make our art and write our own stories; to live our lives with greater intention instead of allowing our stories merely to write themselves.