Welcome friends and thank you for checking out my first blog of 2020! If you are a returning reader, welcome back! I’m assuming you require less acclamation and explanation for what’s in store. If this is your first time reading my thoughts, I feel that a preamble is necessary. Some of my rambles may not make sense to you. Or maybe they will because writing is a truly unruly, often untethered venture for me. I find that the squirrels which run freely in my head will often take what started as a well-thought-out theme and scamper across the grey matter of my brain through the synapsis and branches of old, dusty memories, and into deep unconscious nests. When this occurs, the finished product is an entirely different thing than what I’d set out to do, but I publish it anyway, hoping that someone will benefit from the few nuts of wisdom the squirrels have shared.
Alright, with that out of the way, let’s get to work. 2020 is, to put it in the most minimized way, quite interesting and somewhat challenging so far. Many of us are home now – or home more now, and that provides many unique opportunities to “Take the First Step” in areas we’ve been procrastinating, denying, or simply forgot about (huh – we never did repair that hole in the drywall near the front door that drunken uncle Larry fell through 15 years ago at the New Year’s Eve party did we?).
So now is the time. Or maybe it’s not. But, like most things I ruminate and write about, it might be the time. In the end, it’s really up to you to decide. And for me, the recognition that many things are truly up to me to decide is very empowering. It helps me to recognize the choices that I have in any given situation. As simple as this concept may sound, it actually took me many, many years to understand, and I might have missed it entirely if it hadn’t been for Eckhart Tolle’s book “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment.” If you’re a regular reader, I strongly suggest you check it out. You can also listen to his podcasts about the book. Here is a brief overview:
I guess I should talk about this week’s movie suggestion now. Did I mention that I’m writing these blogs to recommend good movies during our social distancing period yet? Most of my early social, spiritual, and sexual information and training came from television and movies. To this day, I live under the delusion (which is healthy, I hope) that I look like The Fonz when I slick back my hair and put my leather jacket on (I know for sure that our noses are also quite similar).
I love watching good movies. Movies that make me feel something. The brain squirrels I mentioned earlier were particularly active when I was growing up (I hear they call this phenomena A.D.H.D. now), and keeping my focus on any one thing was nearly impossible. I didn’t read an entire book until well into high school, and even then, it took tremendous effort. But the squirrels liked movies, and for some reason, they stored away many of the memories from these movies into my long term memory. Why they picked these nuts of information to horde away rather than educational information like the Pythagorean Theorem ( I had to Google just to spell it correctly), I’ll never know, because the squirrels don’t find it necessary to explain themselves. But I digress…
Wag the Dog.
That’s the movie I think you should watch. It came out in 1997 and features a great cast including Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Anne Heche, Woody Harrelson, Kirsten Dunst, and several other well-known stars. I don’t want to give too much away, but I do feel obliged to mention a warning and disclaimer for what you may find offensive if you’re watching the story for the first time 23 years after it’s production.
It addresses what we now frequently call “Fake News,” and how the government spins information in ways that are highly unethical. It also pokes fun at mental health issues in a way that I now (in my 2020 knowledge of things) find stigmatizing and irresponsible.
But when I recently re-watched the movie, it wasn’t because of those things, and the fact they were there at all was somewhat surprising to me. The thing about the movie that originally impacted me and which the squirrels uncovered multiple times during stress and hardship over the last two decades was the resolve and persistence of Dustin Hoffman’s character.
My father had died unexpectedly about one year before the film came out, and life as I knew it was over. My family and I were adjusting to “the new normal” that comes after such a sudden and devastating loss, and movies were a particularly warm and safe source of solace at the time.
Thinking about something else, even for two hours, was a huge relief of the pressure and reality before us.
Dustin’s repeated line, “This is Nothing,” it what I remembered most. And it helped me to get through each day. To separate the minutiae from the truly important stuff, the things that had to get done, the things that truly mattered. Change, loss, and feeling absolutely no power or choice in a situation really sucks.
No, really, it just sucks – bad.
And in my humble opinion, no experience will remind you of how bad that suck feels than the unexpected death of someone you love. Nothing else really matters in those forever, slow-moving moments. Nothing is important. Everything shifts and tilts and quakes, shaking the things you thought were so important, the day to day priorities off from your schedule, sliding everything that was known and normal slowly off the abyss of your old life, the days and weeks before the thing happened that changed it all…
In case it’s not clear yet, I’ve been reminiscing about “Wag The Dog” because we’re all at one of those moments again. Change, loss, and the landmark in our collective lives that will now always and forever mark time between that which happened before the pandemic and things that came after.
But This is Nothing. You can do this. You’ve been through change, and loss, and very limited choices involving sucky outcomes in situations before. Maybe you even learned something from those times. Maybe it made you stronger, more resilient, more flexible, more loving, more present. Maybe this will too.
Just so you know, I’m still working on believing all this, and I know I’ve got a ways to go. But I’m certainly farther along than where I started, and I’m grateful to Dustin and the crew from Wag the Dog for teaching me when to say This is Nothing…
Here’s a trailer from the movie if you want to check it out:
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