The Mystery Box

Last week, a close friend shared a video on Facebook and tagged me in the post.  I almost didn't watch it, because it's eighteen minutes long.  But because I trust my friend, I thought, I'll just try the first three or four minutes and see.  Eighteen minutes later, my imagination was on fire.

Obviously, everyone else in the room adored J.J. Abrams for producing Lost, but I never noticed him until he made Star Trek in 2009 and won my loyalty forever.  I saw that movie in the theater three times and bought it as soon as it came out.  So J.J. Abrams is now a guy I want to hear talking for eighteen minutes.

The whole talk centers on the idea of a mystery box.  So I immediately started thinking about mystery boxes: the red and blue pills in The Matrix; the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland; the strange, pale boy at Forks High who doesn't talk to anyone; the box Pandora was forbidden to open; the apple Eve was forbidden to eat.  We are creatures of insatiable curiosity.  Lock a door and we will find a way to open it.

What I love about the Abrams talk is his idea that we are all mystery boxes, each person alive today or who ever lived.  And each unfamiliar place is a mystery box.  Each new idea is a mystery box.  Abrams made me feel like an explorer with vast, untouched horizons in front of me.  The world is a mystery box full of mystery boxes.  And I think I'm going to go open a few now.  Here's the video!

Open the mystery box of the Dawn Hyperdrive world!  The first book, Dawn Hyperdrive and the Galactic Handbag of Death, is available at Amazon and Smashwords as an ebook and is coming out as a paperback later this week at my website!