Two years ago....I apparently had a lot on my mind, and a lot of time on my hands...

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Yesterday was a rare movie watching day for me. I actually put my HBO to use. Where usually I need it only for the weekly watching of Carnivale, I got the opportunity to watch two movies yesterday, both of which had separate but interesting impacts on me.

First I saw most of a movie called Waking Life. It's an animated thing, which I remember hearing about when it was out because I guess it was apparently filmed with real people and then animated over the top of that or something. I am not sure the movie really has any story, it's mostly just a bunch of philosophical ramblings on many different subjects. It was so full of stuff that I don't think I could even remember to tell you what all I heard, but it did of course set me thinking.

I have always considered myself a philosophically minded person. Not that I subrcribe to any one theory or any one Philosopher's school of thought, even though I have studied some of them. But I have spent most of my life trying to figure it all out. I mean when it all comes to the end what will have been important. The value of our human connections? Our personal appreciations for things of beauty? Our attempts to understand the world and the universe as a bigger entity than ourselves? Beauty is truth and truth beauty as I think Keats said?

I've spent my whole life addicted in every way to the emotions, feelings, and value of everything that posesses aesthitic qualities. Music, Art, Literature, Poetry, Film, Photography, ideas, nature, emotions. Or better said:

"The ideals that have lighted my way and time after time have give me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty and Truth."

--Albert Einstein

I used to spend all this time looking for famous quotes. I literally have pages upon pages of quotes that I once printed out off the computer. I am always in pursuit of "it". The one piece of advice or wisdom that will wrap the whole package up for me. The one perfectly stated phrase that will sum up everything, consisely and beautifully. I like the one above, but it hasn't been the only one I've stated as a personal mantra over the years. I'm always searching, always trying to figure it all out. Maybe that in and of itself is the key. The search and the struggle, the curiosity and questioning that leads us to make discoveries about ourselves and the universe as a whole. Maybe the point is not to come to some final end result, but rather to be actively involved in the process of trying to unearth it. I hope that I will never stop wondering. Never stop along the road to a final destination that I may never reach. Never accept anything less than full engagement in the journey. It's a difficult struggle sometimes. The ideas go in and out and swirl around in my brain like a tornado picking up leaves and tossing them in every direction. Somehow that's what keeps it interesting. Changing and adapting your theories and beliefs accoriding to your current station in life. I guess that's why I could never whole heartedly accept any one religious concept. For me it's all about the discovery of ideas for myself. A set of concepts and truths that guide and help me along the way. That inspire and challenge me. In the movie I do now remember one thing they said. A comment about how there was a much greater gap between the common man and the great artist and philosphers than there was between the common man and the apes. The missing link isn't neccesarily where we think it is so to speak. I may believe that. Maybe the common man does a lot more in common with the animal kingdom than the common man has in common with the great minds, and great artists.

It is a bit frieghtening to think that so many people either don't have the opportunity or the ability to elevate themselves to that level of let's call them the "thinkers". I'd like to consider myself a thinker. Not that I can claim possession of radical and life-changing ideas and theories on par with Einstein or Nietchze (whom they refer to in this story), but I'd like to think that I am at least always on the path to self-awareness, disovery and truth. But I think I do believe that Beauty is Truth and vice versa. I believe that anything you hold in reverence as beautiful holds a personal truth for you. So in turn any truth would be beauty. And not to become to reliant on other's wisdom, but as we all know, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." (I don't however know who said this!)

So moving on to the second movie, which was The Good Girl with Jennifer Aniston and Jake Gyllenhal. This to me was a very sad movie about a lonely depressed wife who befriends a boy who has a delusion that his Holden Caufield from Cather in the rye. She ends up having an affair with him, and they both feel that someone finally "gets" them. But in the end nothing really changes, she stays with her husband and is just happy for the experiece I guess. The character makes the most amazing observsion when deciding whether or not to get involved with the Holden character. She says she wonders if this will be her last chance and whether or not she will, "go to her grave will unlived lives in her veins." It was one of those movie moments that really makes the hair on your arms stand up. There it was, my greatest fear stated in a way that I never could explain it. I'm so deparately afraid of that life. Of the life unlived, of the depressed, unmotivated, doldrums of everyday life. I'm so afraid of being bored, of settling, of getting to a point where I no longer care and am content. Nothing scares me more than this. Nothing strikes the fear in me more than the thought of a life like that in the movie, a life unfullfilled. To become the one who had, "so much potential." Of wasting the gifts, the life, the love, the chances.

It reminds me of one of my favorite movies, also co-starring Jennifer Aniston ironically, called "Dream for an insomniac". The main character says that "Anything less than mad, pasionate, extraordinary love is a waste of time." and "There are too many mediocre things in life to deal with, love shouldn't be one of them." I am afraid to settle, afraid to get comfortable, afraid to lose life's sense of mystery and curiostiy. Although my problem is reconciling this passion with an equally strong yearing for peace, calm and tranquility.

That is what I wish for everyone including myself: Peace & Passion