Thursday, March 5, 2009

Christina at the cinema




Do you ever feel like your life is a movie? Someone says something that sounds pre-scripted, or you find yourself suddenly alone and you realize it's just you now, and any observation is yours alone, everything around you is a show just for you. I'm sure everyone must have moments like this, but for me, there are just so many times that I see the scene from a couple paces back, and a song starts playing in my mind, and I could just see this moment being compelling on screen. In fact, that's probably why I randomly break out into song 6-10 times on average a day. Often they're not songs I had stuck in my head, they just seem to fit the moment.

I was thinking, this might be part of the reason I'm such an optimist. It's easier to pick myself up and dust myself off when I'm the heroine I'm cheering on. It's so much more obvious that you're supposed to rise up, to embrace adversity as a necessary component to success if you can remove yourself just enough to get a better perspective.

I did a report on out of body experiences for Psych last semester, and one theory is that OBE's are evidence of a fourth "spacial" dimension (as in, not time, which is debated but often thought or referred to as the 4th dimension. String theory postulates 11 or so, and I do not think String Theorists consider time to be the 4th, so this could be the origin of time's getting knocked out of a dimension slot...) but basically, it's compared to an ant that exists in two dimensions who can only go north and south, east and west, how completely dumbfounded they would be if they inadvertently walked onto a leaf that got picked up by the wind. What would they make of the scene below? What if they were returned safely, what would the other ants think of their story? Probably exactly what we think of people who try to explain their OBE's, which typically is that we tell them it's all in their head.

Like my movie. It's in my head. But actually I brought that up to illustrate how it feels on a regular basis when I am suddenly aware of my life as something other than inescapable. Somehow, this being a movie motivates me to change what I don't like. A character in a movie has a lot of control, whereas I often feel like I don't. But really it's amazing what you can change when you try. How how your situation can stay the same, but be completely transformed when you get a new perspective. Sometimes I'm the ant that flew. And it's not that the world changed, but that it was different than we thought all along.