More Joy!

[Guest guest]

Here's a review of the movie I just posted about that talks about

changing our lives for the better:

 

startribune.com

Editorial: On a new year/Imagining, creating a life

 

 

Published January 1, 2005

 

This business of living is so hard -- and so fascinating. Day upon

day we awake in rooms of light and shadow, feeling a joyous breeze

tangle with an unnameable sorrow. And on no day is this poignancy --

this sense of life's blessings and its certain losses -- so evident

to us as on the first day of a new year. There's something about the

hanging of a new calendar that makes us mull how we'll fill the days

and months to come. We cannot help but wonder whether stepping over

the threshold between last year and this can spur us to live as we'd

truly like to live.

 

It's strange, isn't it, how many of us inhabit an existence we don't

prefer? There are scores of reasons why we do it -- because of habit

or duty, dedication or inertia, and too often because we don't dare

to imagine we might rise up from the ashes of the past as some

lovelier creature than we were yesterday. We abide with what we

know -- not just because we must, but because we can't see beyond

our own circumstances.

 

Who, after all, takes up playing the banjo in her late 40s? Or

finally learns to knit properly after decades of half-made scarves?

There's folly, surely, in pursuing any path whose destination we

can't be sure of reaching -- and also the prospect of unforeseen way

stations. Remaking a life halfway through is somehow seen as an

audacious act -- not to mention selfish and dangerous. Who are we to

interrupt the momentum of the life we've been given -- to decide

that its longtime rhythms clash with the cadence in our hearts? The

expected response to discontent is forbearance -- a strategy advised

by the Grin-and-Bear-it Society (whose mission statement, it turns

out, calls for "discouraging people from thinking too much of

themselves").

 

Most of us, fortunately, aren't fully won over by that conformist

doctrine. Come the new year, we at least seize the moment to resolve

to live a nobler life. Yet most New Year's resolutions seem to melt

away with the January thaw, verifying the truth of an observation by

the philosopher William James: "We are stereotyped creatures," he

once said, "imitators and copiers of our past selves."

 

Need it be so? There is much reason to think not. Psychologists have

long asserted that we have far more ability to shape our lives than

we believe -- and that tapping that change-power entails shaking off

the self-limiting assumption that we are victims of circumstance.

The prospect of "living the life you've imagined," as Henry David

Thoreau put it, is well within reach -- if only we will seize the

moment.

 

If you need a little help believing this is so, find time this

weekend to see a magical independent film playing in a few theaters

about town: "What the Bleep Do We Know?" weaves interviews of 14

acclaimed scientists with a sweet story line starring Marlee Matlin

as a photographer constrained by her own convictions about what is

possible. The film makes the subtle case that quantum physics -- the

science of possibility -- and neuroanatomy have much to teach us

about bringing our dreams to life.

 

Again and again, science has revealed the seemingly impossible to be

true. On this New Year's Day in a time of great strife, there may be

no better way to heal the world -- and live your dreams -- than

going to see a movie.