The other evening I was finishing up work and turned on the tv to see what was showing.  Since it was after midnight, I turned to the Showtime channels so I wouldn’t have to mute the commercials every 11 minutes.  I use the mute button a lot on my remote control.  I often watch entire shows with the sound muted.  For work, I have to hear so much that I like a break from sound as often as I can get it.  On my personal time, I am vigilant over what I allow to come into my consciousness.  That’s why I always look at the preview guide, to see what’s coming up and see if it’s something I want to watch.  I’m not into violent movies or gore or gratuitous sex.  I don’t even care for tear jerker sentimentalism. I like suspenseful stories and funny movies, although I’m not into slapstick comedies.  It’s not just that I’m not into the emotional roller coaster rides many movies take you on, it’s that the less of that input I get, the better I am at my job.  Period.

For a few days, I’d seen American Psycho 2 on the lineup and of course avoided it.  Then I saw it starred Mila Kunis and William Shatner and watched it because I like the two of them.  It was funny and suspenseful and I was glad I watched it – although I would not have, just based on the name or the description of the story.  Nothing said it was a comedy but it clearly was.  You can’t always trust those movie descriptions (or reviews), can you?

So the other night I see there’s a movie coming on and it sounds watchable, so I turn it on.  I can’t recall the name of it.  I missed the beginning with the title and movie credits, but caught it from the first scene. The preview guide listed it as about a woman trying to find her identity.  So as the movie unfolds, that’s what I’m looking for.  And nothing is making any sense.  There doesn’t seem to be a central female character 1/3 of the way into the movie and it’s just about narcissistic men who make bad decisions.  I checked the preview guide again.  Then it dawned on me that they are simply listing one movie yet showing another.

So, armed with this new information, I tried to backtrack and remember what all the characters were doing so I could catch up with the rest of the movie.  But it’s not so easy since I started out watching it with one idea in mind of what I was watching.  Armed with inaccurate information, I couldn’t make sense of what was in front of me, since it didn’t match what I was told to watch for.  And watching what I was told to watch for preventing me from seeing what was really unfolding before me.

I thought how often do I do that in real life? In thinking the movie was about something else, I was trying to make the wrong pieces fit.  How often have I encountered situations that someone had told me would be a certain way, and found the pieces did not fit?  Then I try to figure it all out based on a faulty premise.

Kind of like seeing the world through the eyes the popular media would have you look at it: as a scary place full of fearful cataclysmic events, with terrorists lurking in every dark corner. That’s not a movie I want to star in.  I don’t have to and you don’t either. We can take in the information others give us but we don’t have to rely on it to tell us what to experience.  We can stay awake and aware in each moment and determine for ourselves what is unfolding before us.

At any point it seems we’re trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, we can drop the info we’ve been given and try another puzzle piece.  We can try as many puzzle pieces as it takes until it makes sense.  We can listen to as many other perspectives as it takes until we find our own fit.  We can entertain as many notions as it takes until life begins to make sense for us.  This is how we take charge of what movie we are starring in.

Albert Einstein said, “The most important question facing humanity is, ‘Is the universe a friendly place?’ This is the first and most basic question all people must answer for themselves.  For if we decide that the universe is an unfriendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to achieve safety and power by creating bigger walls to keep out the unfriendliness and bigger weapons to destroy all that which is unfriendly—and I believe that we are getting to a place where technology is powerful enough that we may either completely isolate or destroy ourselves as well in this process.

“If we decide that the universe is neither friendly nor unfriendly and that God is essentially ‘playing dice with the universe’, then we are simply victims to the random toss of the dice and our lives have no real purpose or meaning.

“But if we decide that the universe is a friendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to create tools and models for understanding that universe. Because power and safety will come through understanding its workings and its motives.”

My experience is that the world is as friendly a place as I believe it to be.  My experience is it’s a wondrously friendly place, always waiting to delight me.  That’s the movie I’m starring in.

How about you?  What movie are you starring in?

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