Thinking About that "Movie Moment"

Have you ever had a “movie moment?” Or, better yet, what would you consider a movie moment?

Sometimes, in social situations, or within my own thought process, I find myself saying aloud, “Wow, that was a movie moment.”

You know what I’m talking about...

It’s that moment when he realizes that she is the one. Or, the moment that they both realize they’re in on the joke together. Or, the aha moment! that two people, friends, or lovers, have when they discover they are far more similar than they ever thought possible. 

You know the line (thanks Harry from When Harry Met Sally): “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible!” 

But, have you ever been watching a movie and felt that you already had your own movie moment and completely blew it? Have you ever actually found yourself standing in the rain somewhere about ready to tell some guy or some girl that you want to marry them some day and then you don’t?

Here’s the thing. It was more than 10 years by the time I found out that a guy from high school waited outside my sophomore year English class every day and I just walked right by him. Why don’t you people say anything? What’s more, I wonder why even bother telling me now? 

Is there some “hopeful romantic” (not hopeless, but hopeful) thread running through all of us? Do we all somehow sit there and think that the guy we’re having dinner with has been thinking all the same things we’re thinking, but all we do is think it? 

To all the people who say that this (real life) is not the movies, I say yes, that is true. However, we’re all just as stupid and vague and love-struck as all of those movie characters in those predictable movies. We just don’t have a music track to cue the aha-moment!, or the run to him or her in the rain, or the “it’s you” revelation.

What’s your movie moment?

You Can't Be Right If You're Worried About Time

There is a lot of inspiration in a 100 Grand candy bar.

I ran track in high school. (Seems fitting since I liked to run, err, chase, people around the playground in elementary school).

The whole distance thing didn’t work out for me, but 100 meters, and I was there. My Coach, I seem to remember, was a one-time Olympian. He scared me.

The head coach, on the other hand, would give out 100 Grand candy bars. I don’t even remember what for, but it was inspiring. 

I wasn’t fast. I sat a lot of meets out. But, boy, did I love to run. I wasn’t the fastest on the team, but I was the fastest in PE class. I’d run so fast in class that by the time I got to practice, I couldn’t run anymore. Coach never made me feel like I wasn’t fast enough. 

It wasn’t until some 15 years later that I’d hear how important it was to be “fast” and to be “first.” (Thanks slogans and mantras at news stations.) We also had to be right.

So, how can one be fast? First? And Right? All at the same time?

Well, clearly. One has to slow down. You can’t be right if you’re worried about time all the time. Even if you got through the finish line fast enough, how can you be sure you’re actually first? What if you didn’t run the race right? What if you threw out your knee so bad that you finished, but have to wear a brace for the next two weeks. That’s no fun.

I had the shin splints for two weeks. I hated that. 

Then, in college, I thought I’d run a marathon. Six miles into training I felt what sounded like a gunshot go up my left knee. That would be the beginning of deteriorating cartilage.

I still like to run. I just don’t have to be first. Or fast. I just want to run. There’s nothing to run from, or to run to anymore. 

You know what? This is for all the people who give up their candy bars because they have to get in shape. 

Run. Run anyway. Then eat a 100 Grand. You deserve it. Coach said so. Then run tomorrow, too. 

But, I'm not in a hurry. I'll get there, wherever there is, someday.




Photo Courtesy: http://www.franticmeerkat.com/

Stand Up, Take the Chance

Every now and then, there is a time to become retrospective. You know, to stare back at your past and contemplate past situations.

The other day, I bought pickles. Someone I know didn’t like pickles at all and often would say, “Eww, gross.” Sometimes the sound “blech” would even be uttered.

Yum.... pickles.

I like pickles. I also like olives. Ok, so sometimes, I really like salty things that have a vinegar kind of taste, and I will walk for miles until I find them.

When I was younger, I gave advice to friends who were at that time the age that I am now. I would say, “If there’s something you want, do it.” 

Of course, I assumed all known consequences would be taken into consideration and they wouldn’t actually do anything that could get them into trouble.

So, here I am, the other day, standing at my kitchen counter staring at this jar of pickles. Then, it dawned on me, I really wanted those pickles. In fact, I wanted them just as much as I wanted olives in 1994. 

Almost 17 years ago, I was in Spain. My parents sent me there as part of an Educational Foreign tour (which I highly recommend, by the way). Towards the last leg of the trip, I was staying somewhere along the Costa del Sol and enjoying the sunshine. It was just hours before my 14th birthday and I had a hankering for something salty. Not just salty, I wanted olives. 

So, I gathered up my little backpack and I started walking along a boardwalk, a sidewalk along the beach. I walked, and I walked, and I really do not know how long I walked. Yet, clear as if it were two minutes ago, I remember walking, turning left into a store, and darting straight for “cans of stuff.” I sure was persistent. I found my olives, I bought them with whatever little money I had left, and walked all the way back to my hotel room. I don’t even remember how I opened the can, but I sat there and I ate every single olive. I even stuck the olives on my fingers, and ate them off of the tips, just as if I were 7 again.

The point is, I wanted those olives (or pickles, I would have taken pickles). I knew that eating them wouldn’t hurt me, so I took the risk, or rather, the chance, of walking along that boardwalk by myself in search of something that, in that moment, was so important.

It was my very own, yet incredibly small “call to action.” 

That stand up and take charge desire carries with me through today. 

On March 30, 1999, 5 years after my olive pursuit, and 2 years after a several mile walk through London to find Dr. Pepper (yet, another story), I sat down to write something about taking charge. 

I stumbled across it recently, in this green hand-written journal I've been keeping since 1997. Now, I believe it resonates with the entire focus of doing something. 

In part, it reads:

“You’ve got to take the chance.

Never wash your hands.

Let them run through your hair.

You’ve got to give yourself praises.

Never be a bum.

You can do more than chew gum.

You’ve got to take charge.

Never let your ambition die. 

You know you can claim all your fame.

If you know there’s something you want to do,

Get up the courage.

Stand up, take the chance.

If you know there’s something you want to do

Get up, take charge.

Never walk away, it doesn’t matter

if you’re ten minutes late.” 

I think that now I could add a line to the part there in bold. Remember Lee Ann Womack’s song, “I Hope You Dance,” well, just remember “Stand up, take the chance, I Hope You Dance.” 

Or, Martina McBride, and her song “Anyway.” Unlike that first part, it’s not about fame. It’s just about doing something good just because it makes you, or someone else, smile. 

In the Midst of a Defining Moment

I watched the movie “Sleepless in Seattle” tonight (as in on December 29th, just a few hours ago) for what may have been the twentieth time. Oddly enough, for the first time, I didn’t cry. Not a single tear. One thing I noticed is how much I noticed differently than I did the other nineteen or so times. 

Not a single tear. What does that mean? Is that a disengagement of my current situation or just the subtle, if in fact, awareness of the fact that the lines in the movie are quite adequately true? 

We don’t want to be in love, we want to be in love in a movie.

When I was in high school, a columnist wrote that unlike the television show “Friends” (which happened to be my favorite), we don’t hear theme songs or a laugh track in real life. This I know to be true. 

Is this the moment, the moments after I turn off the TV and let it sink in that this is real life and not a movie, I realize that this may be a defining moment? 

Let me step back for a minute and say that this Reverb 10 business is like homework therapy. Two of the most recent prompts, “Ordinary Joy” and “Defining Moment”, both deserve their own separate posts. However, I wanted to be inspired so I popped in a movie that I thought would make me laugh and cry. 

So, here we go.

I believe we can experience ordinary joy with a laugh and a cry. About a week and a half ago someone sent me a message and the first line read, “I’m so proud of you.” In an instant, unlike any instant I’ve experienced recently, I cried. I was fully crying, tears streaming down my face, and then, I started laughing as I recognized I was experiencing complete and utterly ordinary joy. 

It is amazing how one person can say just one thing and it can change our entire experience, for the moment, for the journey, or for the entire course of our lives. Sure, people tell you and I they’re proud of us often, I’m sure, but when do we really actually hear it?

“I’m so proud of you,” I read the words again, and for the first time in a long time wasn’t embarrassed. Like everyone, I needed someone to be proud of me. Then, to continue on and say, “See how strong you really are.” 

This, as simple as it was, may have been the most defining recent moment of 2010. It certainly doesn’t define the entire year, or the experience of the year, but it defines how it’s ending and the entrance to 2011. 

Have you ever wondered why people cry at romantic comedies? They’re looking for a happy ending. No, not the happy endings that make the news, but happy endings like the one in which Annie finally gets to figure out why she’s so intrigued by that man who is Sleepless in Seattle. There’s some truth to the wonderings that keep us up at night. We’re curious by nature, and if part of that pursuit is finding our happiness, we have to go with it, right? 

There is complete and total ordinary joy in watching a movie, or reading a note, or hearing words that can make one smile, whether you’re the one smiling or the one saying the nice things. I believe, that in each instance where we experience some ordinary joy, we’re also in the midst of a defining moment.