It has been a slow, easy, relaxing weekend. I like it. Last night, my husband and I fell on to the couch rather late and ended up watching the acclaimed film Roma. It is one of those slow, methodical, detail oriented, art house types of film that speaks to me more than it does to my husband. When we went to bed last night, I couldn’t decide whether I liked it or not (my husband clearly decided that he did NOT like it), but I could not stop thinking about it. This morning I decided that I liked the movie and I still could not stop thinking about it. I would say that it was the deeper, more artistic, more “left for interpretation”, Mexican version of the movie, The Help.
What I took from the movie is that no matter how you define your relationships with the other people in your life, you cannot help but forge a deeper connection that goes beyond the definition of what that relationship is supposed to be. Roma depicts a year in the life of a privileged Mexican family in the 1970s, from the viewpoint of their devoted nanny. The family’s nanny, Cleo, has to balance taking care of every practical and emotional aspect of the various family members during a particularly difficult time in the family’s collective lives, and yet she still tries to find time to nurture and to deal with her own life’s happenings and sorrows. This movie reminded me of instances like when you are a kid, and you are utterly shocked to see your teacher in the grocery store. Or even when you are older and you are devastated to hear that a trusted leader or clergy member or even a friend or family member, is not that superhuman that you had built them up in your mind to be. Sometimes we all fall into the egocentric state of mind that everything and everyone in our lives, revolves around us. We forget that other people’s lives and problems and ways of seeing and dealing with instances, are every bit as complicated and difficult to navigate, as our own. And depending on their “starting point”, sometimes even more complicated and difficult than we can even comprehend.
sonder
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows