Is That It?

Last night I watched a movie with a nebulous ending. Do you like movies like these? Usually I get frustrated with vague endings. I want to know what happened. I feel like throwing something at the TV. It’s like I watched the whole entire movie, for what? When the credits start scrolling, I’m screaming, “What?! Wait, noooo! That can’t be the ending!” I feel duped. I watched the movie to lose myself in it. I don’t want to have to expend the energy to use my own imagination to decide what is happening next. That’s too much work, plus it’s not my project to finish. Coming up with your own ending to a movie is like finishing someone else’s painting, or sculpture, or knitting project. It just doesn’t feel right. On extremely rare occasions, I do feel like fuzzy endings are absolutely apropos. They make you think, “Oh, how clever!” They make you giggle a little inside, at yourself and at the situation. Gilda Radner once called this “delicious ambiguity.” But usually these frustrating, open-ended movie endings much more often make you think, “Oh, how incredibly annoying! Thank you for ruining two hours of my life!”

I think that we like movies and projects and books that perfectly tie up all the loose ends into a precious, neat little bow, because real life falls more along the lines of unclear, uncertain and unsure. Real life is more like a messy, tangled ball of yarn. But our minds don’t like to believe the fact of life’s unsurety. If the stories we tell ourselves have satisfying conclusions, than we think that this somehow guarantees these kinds of conclusions for ourselves, in our own lives. We like the illusion of control. We cling to it.

The movie I saw last night reminded me of a treacherous time in my own life when I felt as scared and unsure as what to do as the main character must have felt as she was sitting helplessly in the back of the car, headed to a hellish place, perhaps. At that real moment in my own life, I was nauseated with fear, as I was feeling my heartbeat pounding in my chest. My mind became frozen, stuck in a terrifying reel of envisioning what could easily end up being my horrific, ominous, futile fate. But then I let my intuition take over, and I felt my own shaky legs, as if on their own volition, backing up the narrow, dark stairway and then I did the next right thing that probably saved my life . . . .

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.