I love a good saga. Sadly, the word “saga” does not have quite the same impact it once had and that is a real shame because sagas are important. They are windows to how grand existence can be. Tales that have forever gone down in history, surviving centuries, even millennia, to spark the next generation’s imagination, and the next after that, and the next. How many times has the tale of Odin been told, from how many tongues? Or Beowulf? Or Heracles, or Aragorn son of Arathorn, or Luke Skywalker?

I would be a liar to tell anyone, especially myself, that my life is so grandiose. But I feel strongly that we should all aspire to live our own sagas. Live grandly. Enthusiastically. Slay the dragon. Eat the feast. Ascend your wizard tower. Sadly, we live in a world in which we are meant to stay small. We are made by outside, external forces to be non-player characters in our own lives. What a joy it would be to wrench our own stories back! What a victory it would be to exist as our own main character—whether that be a knight in shining armor, or a humble hobbit who lives in a cozy hole.

There is a song that I became obsessed with near the beginning of the year. “Life’s What You Make It” by the band Talk Talk. It isn’t the band’s biggest hit, but it stayed in the top 20 on the charts for a while in Great Britain. It’s driven by this amazing, percusssive piano bassline that stays in your brain once you hear it. The title of the song comes in right away in the first line of the first verse and is echoed all throughout. “Baby, life’s what you make it.” It is a perfect song. It is a song that should probably play in the end credits of every John Hughes movie, or at least as the soundtrack to the idea of making your life a saga. Why not make your life a John Hughes movie? Or some kind of dramatic Steven Spielberg film? Or a Peter Jackson epic? Put down the smart phone. Leave it at home. Go do something grand, and then put the Talk Talk song in the credits. Make the word “saga” grand again. You deserve it.