Aw come on, surely you have asked yourself these two questions at various points in your life. Maybe at a funeral, a graduation, or in the realisation of an epic failure and the usual bender that follows. Maybe you just find yourself in a quiet lull in between the stuff that keeps us too busy to pause and reflect intentionally.
Right now I'm sitting in an office high rise waiting for some software update to finish downloading and installing and I find my thoughts have brought me back to this blog and why I haven't updated since last year.
To my surprise Forrest Gump is the answer to the first question, and that seems to apply to the second question as well. Allow me to explain. The first minutes of the movie shows a feather being carried by the wind all over the place only to land at Forrest's shoe where he picks it up and admires it. Forrest is a simple man with an appreciation for things that most of us would hardly notice. He is intellectually disabled but somehow he makes his way in a hostile world and manages to touch so many lives in a way that changes them for the better. He does it with courage, honour, and humility.
Granted I am no Forrest Gump, but I'd like to be more like him. I've spent so much of my life living in fear of what the future holds, it's taken me all this time to let go of the controls. What I mean is that until this last decade, I have been furiously paddling upstream to get to a destination that I thought was where everyone was supposed to try to get to. That was damn exhausting.
What I've taken on is to feel which way the current is going and enjoy the adventure. Like that feather in the breeze, it didn't know where it was going, but boy did it get around.
I'm not saying I've become lazy. I still exercise volition and make choices that move my life in a particular direction, but rather than spending my life head down and waiting for the day when I reach my goals, I am taking time to enjoy the journey. Even when the detours seem to lead me away in a totally different direction. I try not to despair even when the detours seem too long and pointless, I'm sure something round the next bend will reveal meaning that will make it worth the delay. It may even set me on a new path and be just as exciting.
Much like this blog post, it all seems pointless. Until...
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Newsflash: The movie I was in will be released at Hoyts cinemas on September 1 this year. Hope you all watch it, I'm in the last 10 minutes of the film.
