While reading a book called "The Spirituality of Imperfection" -- which was full of different sayings (True sayings? Untrue sayings? The book kind of lets you draw your own conclusions) -- one of the sayings which stood out to me was, "God created Man because He loves stories."
I recently watched a movie, and it occurred to me that movies are just stories. And the point of movies is to enjoy them - you don't go to the movie just to see the ending. What would the point be? A movie has a beginning and an ending, both important, but 95% of the movie is the stuff in the middle. Just like life. And if you're constantly trying to guess what's gonna happen next in the movie instead of just enjoying it, you're gonna spoil the movie for yourself (and everyone around you if you make your guesses out loud.)
I've always felt kind of sorry for movie critics. They never get to enjoy movies at all, hardly... they're too busy taking mental notes and judging the movie. Well, they might enjoy parts of them, but in general it's their job and therefore it's work. What I never realized was that in fact I was a movie critic - a critic of the biggest movie of all, the movie of life (starring yours truly, of course!) I was always judging and criticizing every part of it, every actor including and especially myself - and everything else about life, whether it had anything to do with me or not.
Kind of hard to enjoy the movie while doing that.
Also, rather than recognize that each person (including myself) is at various stages of their story, I'd judge them all as though their story were over at that particular moment - and either they were worse than me or better than me. Either way, what misery!
So now I'm trying to be less of a life critic and more of a life enjoyer; trying to avoid judging others and myself, realizing instead that there's no way to know how anyone's story will end, or in fact to ever know every factor which caused a person to become the way they are at any given moment in time. (Me included!)
I'm just one of God's stories in progress and so is everyone else on this Earth. It's not for me to judge the worthiness of his stories.
-- Edited by FlyingSquirrel on Monday 8th of March 2010 08:00:13 AM
I like this, well put, I always knew I struggled with the whole "Shakespeare said all the world is a stage but he forgot to mention I was the chief critic" section following the Acceptance speech in the Big Book (by had a problem with I mean I engaged in the behavior) but never heard it put so succinctly why/how it takes away from my life
It ties the not placing values on things from The Tao Te Ching and helps me see how that behavior is harmful to me.
If I am judging and critiquing I am not simply enjoying the show, hence am not being happy, joyous and free
Seriously, thank you, another part of the elephant learned about (from the poem about the blind men and the elephant)
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Glad you liked it... of course I posted it for selfish reasons, (to get positive feedback) :D
That's what I like the best about this site - I can take a half-baked idea that I expressed poorly at a meeting, and take my time honing it to... well, not perfection but definitely a better form than it took in the meeting!
FlyingSquirrel wrote:I can take a half-baked idea that I expressed poorly at a meeting, and take my time honing it to... well, not perfection but definitely a better form than it took in the meeting!
LoL
I can relate to that, I can't count the times I was called on to share and I had something on deck and lined up that would be a combination of Gandhi, MLK jr, and John Lennon but instead the side of my neck opened up and I channeled Megan from The Exorcist instead
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Build a man a fire and he will be warm for a night, light a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
