Weights and Measures

I haven't seen "Up In The Air" yet. I haven't seen a movie in a theater in, oh, about a year or so. But I saw the trailer and I have been thinking about the Clooney monologue about unpacking your metaphorical backpack that would be filled with all of the things you have, the things you own, the places you've been and all the experiences you've had, the people you've barely known, the strangers you've passed, the people you've liked, the people you've loved for a time, the people who are your best friends and lovers and family that starts, "This is going to be a little difficult so stay with me." And asks:

How much does your life weigh?

The slower we move the faster we die.

In light of my recent post about anger and diffusion, conversations and confusions, I should see this movie, I think.

I have a hard time with faith. With belief in anything past nothingness, past randomness, but anyone who works in the creative world has to have felt Grace and has to have experienced Mystery and Magic. So this I wonder about. Are things put in our path to challenge us, for us to learn and relearn and relearn, to stumble and fall and to do it all over again until either we get it right or we walk down another road? Do we feel like we have the same conversation again, over and over, like a Deja Vu? Have the same relationships but with different faces? I know, this is the stuff of Jung and Patterns. But is it greater than that and by Greater I am not really talking about God. I heard on NPR a story of a woman who was in a coma (I think...it was Morning Edition and the coffee hadn't kicked in) but in her state she felt a Euphoria she connected with a total Oneness with the universe, a kind of Ecstatic peace. The interviewer kept trying to connect that with a sense of God and the woman kept saying, no, it was all about synapses. That she'd only had access to a part of her brain that was a more universal part, not the half that deals in details (and forgive my paring this complex interview into barely a coherent explanation, I'm almost embarrassed, but its been a day of cleaning the house while watching endless reruns of "Housewives of New Jersey" just for fun and then finishing up tracks in the studio and then drinking some good wine while cooking, so I'm not at my fullest of intellectual abilities tonight). And she wouldn't say it was God or religion. Just science. Brain science.

So maybe brain science puts us in places, with people, in conversations we need to be in, in order to muddle through the muck of this life, in order to get to the next level.

Or maybe we keep trying to haul that damned rock up the hill only to fall back a few steps and keep running into the same people with their own rocks, up the same damned hill, tripping on that same crack in the ground.

Well, my backpack is as heavy as yours I'm sure. And it keeps getting heavier and heavier, which slows down the walk. I looked across at the yellow chair that's empty that sits in front of my fireplace tonight. I was watching "The Time Traveller's Wife." I needed a good chick flick. A love movie of star-crossedness to wring out the stuff stuck in my throat. And that movie did it. Just made me weep. Its not a great movie but it was good timing. (p.s. a great movie for the heavy weeping is "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"). And in that chair I could just see my late grandmother, the owner of that chair, who I feel is still hovering somewhere in the molecules above, lightly tripping up and down those hills I am still trying to climb.