I was going through my newsfeed the other day and a link came up for Huffpost live. It was a discussion with Crispin Glover on the message that media puts out in some movies.
First of all I never realized that Crispin Glover was that deep a thinker honestly. He’s apparently quite perceptive and insightful. This discussion got me thinking on a different tack about how decisions affect our lives.
(by the way, this is one of the reasons that I love cinema. You can derive so many themes, ideas, and visions from a movie that it’s astonishing)
In the above movie that Glover references (“Back to the future”) his character, George, makes a bad decision at a young age that affects the rest of his life. He has been making bad decisions based on fear all of his life but this one really affect him and his future wife.
Basically he allows his future wife to be raped by the neighborhood bully. This event victimizes both of them and they live in a spiral of hopelessness and shame leading them downwards on a dark path of despair. George takes a menial job and allows his tormentor to continue to harass him. George and his wife end up trapped living a life that is neither satisfactory nor fulfilling.
George’s son goes back in time and intervenes causing George to make the right decision and this in turn affects the rest of his life.
When the son returns to the altered future he finds that his parents have been emboldened by the correct choice that George made and their life is a success in every way. The same two people, the same town, but totally altered by one seemingly tiny change in the past.
Plugging all this back into the real world, how have the decisions in our past affected our current life situation? You make that initial bad decision back in kindergarten and twenty years later you’re working in McDonald’s rather than going to Harvard.
A gross overstatement to be sure but I don’t think that the average young person gives enough weight to these seemingly innocuous life choices. Go out and party on a Friday night or study, burn through your weekly paycheck or save it, stand up for yourself or let someone else walk over you.
One or two decisions you can probably bounce back from. But it’s when you make bad decision after bad decision and they pile up on you and suddenly you find that your options aren’t that open anymore. Suddenly you no longer have a good or bad option, suddenly it’s bad option or even worse option. What’s more, the more you make these bad decisions the more you become accustomed to the penalties attached to them and even grow to expect them as a part of your daily life.
How do we break this downward trend? Is it even breakable?
Well yes of course it is. We can hope for an outside agency to intervene (like someone with a time machine or a crazy millionaire philanthropist willing to invest in you) but that rarely happens.
Most of the time it’s going to happen by making a hard “right” choice some time and following it up with even more hard “right” choices until you climb back to where you want to be in your life.
That’s what makes these early choices on your decision tree so vitally important. Once you bend that stalk in the wrong direction it takes a mighty effort to turn it back the way it should be going.
Recent Comments