A few night ago, I watched one of my favorite movies, Stranger Than Fiction. After watching it, I started thinking about this blog post. This morning, though, I discovered that I already wrote a very similar post last summer after watching the same movie. Since I didn't even remember this, I'm sure you don't remember it either, so it can't hurt to write it again now. Besides, this should just tell how how good of a movie Stranger Than Fiction is, since it made me want to blog twice. So go watch it.
When the movie starts, the main character, Harold Crick, lives a life of monotony. He does the exact same thing every day down to the second, and it's not a very interesting life. Over the course of the film, however, Harold begins to change the way his life looks. Instead of just going to work and coming home to eat alone, he stops counting how many steps it takes to get the the bus stop, and he starts playing guitar and flirting with an anarchist baker. By the end, Harold's life is completely different than it was at the beginning. He brought about change. He developed, and he was much better for it.
This change didn't come about by happenstance. Harold Crick doesn't go to bed one night as a calculating IRS agent living a life of solitude and then wake up the next morning as a different person. The story of his life develops because he himself chooses to enact change. He's not just sitting on his couch when a guitar and Maggie Gyllenhaal fall throw the ceiling. He figures out what he wants and goes out and tries to get it, and it involves action and risk and vulnerability and the chance for failure or rejection. But those are the things that make a good story, I think.
I'm a bit of a daydreamer. I often sit around and think about the life I would like to be living, or I think about the person I would like to be. My problem is that I'm hesitant to go make that life happen, and I don't take any steps to grow into the person I could be. As a result, things don't really change, and it becomes easy for me to complain about how I'm not entirely satisfied with how things are going for me.
The law of inertia says that an object at rest will remain at rest. I suppose that's why changing is so difficult. It's much more comfortable for me to lay here in my bed than it is for me to go out and meet new people or try new things or put myself in a situation that might not turn out how I want. As far as life development is concerned, maybe I'm in a state of rest, and I need a kick to get me rolling.
Maybe you're like me in that. A truth that we need to grasp on to is that the best things in life don't just fall into our laps. They almost always require that we go out in search of them, and that usually involves risk and possible failure. It's much easier to just sit in your bedroom and think about what things could be like than it is to try to make it be so. But the latter is much more rewarding.
On a side note, this last Wednesday I gave the devotion for the senior adults lunch at my church, and after I was done, they had a singing group made up of senior citizens come perform. First time I had ever heard an 80-year-old woman yodel. Best Senior Saints lunch ever.
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