SPOILER ALERT
If you haven't seen the movie and don't want spoilers, stop now.
Come back after.
We'll be right here waiting.
Okay, so either you've seen it or don't care.
This movie connected with me in so many layers, notwithstanding that I am exactly at Evelyn's crossroads. I am minutely aware that all my choices have led me into this exact moment. The challenge is to be present in that moment whether it be overwhelming or dreadful.
I have moments of daydreaming, nostalgically cherry-picking moments in my life where a different choice would have led to a vastly different existence. Take for example the time I professed my love for the very first time in my life, it was the scariest thing I had ever done in my entire life thus far. Do I win her or do I lose her? I imagined a life ahead that we shared side-by-side, it all hung in the balance. In another universe perhaps that led to a completely different outcome, then fast-forward four decades and imagine how both versions of me would feel about each other's choices? Both of them equipped with the same decades of memories of struggle, triumph, crisis, and mediocrity.
Personally, I love the mundane moments most of all. All the shit that I complained about in my 30s, turns out to be the kind of things I now associate with my happy place. Like driving to the city twice a day to drop off and collect my wife at her workplace. I was mostly alone in the car, listening to radio or playing cassettes. Not unlike my current job delivering parcels.
I've started and abandoned many hobbies, just like Evelyn. Some of them I occasionally practice like Karate-do and Aikido. Some of them I have turned pro, like cooking and dancing. However, just like Waymond (such an adowable name), I have finally understood the supreme importance of kindness.
This movie resonates with me in ways so deep. I felt the disappointment of my father and judgement when I made choices he disagreed with. I wore the same wardrobe in the eighties and nineties. I also dragged my wife and child to start life in a new country, in part because I wanted to prove to my father he was wrong and I was right. But most of all I remember a moment too when I looked at the endless circle track that I was carving in time-space. Telling my daughter how to do better as an adult when I wasn't at all sure I had done any better than what my own parents had hoped for.
I have daydreamed of many versions of myself where I was a warrior, a sailor, an explorer. These other versions of me I have tried to access, not with paper cuts or butt-plugs, but by actually trying them out. Like when I learned to fly a plane. I once wondered what my life would be like if I pursued my childhood dream to become a pilot. I've flown enough hours that I'm desperately confident that I can land a single-engine light plane in an emergency.
I've also lived long enough to know that it takes time, a lot of time to get good at anything. So even if I fall in love with a new hobby, there are even chances that I may stick with it or drop it once I have reached a minimum level of proficiency. In terms of the movies, that's why they go through great twisted lengths to explain how anyone can just instantaneously learn to fight like a ninja at a convenient plot point. Because we all inherently know how long it takes to master anything from chess to surfing.
I like to believe there are an infinite versions of me coexisting in infinite universes. There are universes where I am an actor, dancer, writer, explorer, warrior, teacher, etc.
What if I take this idea much further.
What about the other people in the universe we all share? So a new universe just split off when I wrote an entire paragraph and decided to delete it all, but what if someone random decides to call in a sickie instead of going to work, which version of me would be in that universe?
Let me tell you what I am beginning to feel, and it sounds very much explained in The Egg
We practice kindness because everyone else is really us. We are all connected. Like leaves from the giant tree of the multiverse, each life in a tangled chain is one Being on an infinite loop of variations and recombinations (Jeremy Beremy?).
You and I are the same person at various points of our eternal experience.
Aloha.
I love you too.
