Matthew McConaughey’s Red Lights,‘Greenlights,’ and Forced Winters

“The problems we face today eventually turn into blessings in the review mirror of life. In time, yesterday’s red light leads us to a greenlight.”
—Matthew McConaughey
Greenlights

This week I listened to Matthew McConaughey read/perform his entire book Greenlights and two key thoughts resonate:

1. GREENLIGHTS. The metaphor of when you’re driving down the road hitting green light after green light. (To use Mihály Csíkszentmihályi research, that’s when we’re in the flow.) Hitting multiple green lights in a row is nice because so much of our life is filled with yellow and red lights.
2. FORCED WINTER: This is like a prolonged red light. It’s annoying when we cycle through a set of lights and don’t get a green light for whatever reason. We’ve lot a few minutes trying to get where we’re going. But there are more difficult seasons of our lives where we get prolonged red lights for weeks, months or even years. McConaughey refers to these as “forced winters.” This global pandemic is a forced winter for many. Especially for those who’ve lost loved ones to the coronavirus, been sick themselves, lost work, or face added anxiety due to the overall disruption of life.

Part of the message of the book seems to be that there are lessons to learn at the red lights and in the forced winters. And that the long view is those times of resistance set us up for the red lights to turn into green lights and that we emerge from forced winters with renewed faith, hope, and opportunities.

Throughout his memoir McConaughey tells stories of his own red lights/forced winters: An odd year as an exchange student in Australia, his father dying while he was in college, and though once called “the new Paul Newman” his acting career cooled off leading him to a run doing romantic comedies. (No shame there—and well-paid— but not the kind of roles he ideally wanted to be doing.) Perhaps his best forced winter is one he forced upon himself when he starting turning down romantic comedies and moved from Malibu back to Austin. The phone eventually stopped ringing for acting gigs, and he says he even considered heading in a new career direction.

Then he rebounded with roles in a series of independent films which eventually led to his Oscar-winning performance in the Dallas Buyers Club. Of course, there’s no guarantee that that our red lights and forced winters will exalt us to such lofty heights, but it’s important to see others come out of the dark forest with a zest for life.

It seems like every tens years I hit a forced winter. I’m thankful that personally 2020 was a brief red light that turned into a series of green lights. First I finished my book Screenwriting with Brass Knuckles and secondly I bought a Hobie kayak in April for my socially distancing exercise.

In November, I’ll hit my 100th day out on a 440 acre lake. Usually I go out around sunrise for 60-90 minutes and it’s turned a funky season of life into one of my most pleasurable ever. Lots of egrets and hawks, an occasional gator and/or bald eagle, and overall peace and beauty. I took this photo yesterday as a crew team was practicing in the early morning. (It was a rather pedestrian iPhone shot so I ran it through the Prisma Photo Editor app.)

Crew team on Lake Howell—October 30, 2020

If you’re at a red light or in a forced winter, I hope you can look back and have the perspective that other rough times you’ve been through actually set you up for a series of “greenlights.” New relationships, new job opportunities, new adventures.

P.S. Looking back, I realize this blog (and therefore the book) are the result of a forced winter. I moved to the midwest in 2003 for what I thought was a freelance producer gig in Chicago that promised to be a full time gig once a hiring freeze was lifted. The hiring freeze never was lifted and the production arm of the group eventually shut down. But that set up a great 10 year run in Cedar Falls, Iowa—but only after a hard start. (And I actually found the literal cold winters exhilarating.)

Scott W. Smith