If the World Race has taught me anything, maybe it's taught me most what kind of person I wish I were.
Perhaps it's the constant introspection, the manic reflection into your own psyche guessing what the root cause of this was or the actual emotion behind that could've been, surmising what kind of feedback you might be receiving on this remark or that choice of behaviors; the kind of introspection that would make a someone's psychologist a lot of money and empty her pockets and leave her at a vacant table wondering if the money was really worth it over a lukewarm beer, half-watching a pro football game she doesn't care about in a small place she can't remember the name of on a street she rarely visits, staring mutely into space with her finger resting on her cheek, mulling over the path that brought her to this Bud Light on this Tuesday evening with these feelings and this waiter and this emptiness, yet feeling somewhere, somehow contented.
Being around the same people all of the time is much like watching the same movie over and over; regularly seeing rather ordinary, flawed people who sometimes feel like your best friends do rather ordinary, thought-provoking things, things that make you wonder how you lived life for so long so pointlessly without them. That is, until you remember you have no real life context for each other. Then they just annoy you.
However annoying, watching the movie has become a favorite pastime of mine, even if only out of necessity. The life we live is marvelously strange. Grown adults living with grown adults giving grown adults help and advice and friendship and mutual spirituality to get them through their grown-adult lives, all while acting like un-grown children. It's beautifully hideous; other days, hideously beautiful. We should really consider turning the film into a sitcom.
There are the days watching seems redundant.
You know the feeling you get when you excitedly pop in a favorite movie to feel all of the same feelings and cry at all the right drama and laugh in all the right moments in some obsessive-compulsive attempt to feel like your life isn't so spastic and is under control for two short hours – but you discover ten minutes into the movie that you're just not really in the mood to watch it?
I get that feeling on the Race a lot.
But then there are the moments that make the Race – and life – worth it, and sometimes those come in the most ordinary moments, the parts of the movie you think you have memorized and figured out.
Those moments surprise me every time, and they are what reveals to me this kind of person I wish I were, some secret inner longing to be more of something I cognitively understand that I am currently not but my heart innocently believes I could be some day. When the movie's characters are entirely true to themselves in these moments is when I most realize my unfaithfulness to my true self.
Take Mindy, for instance. I've never desired a minute in my life to be completely who Mindy is, but there are the moments when Mindy is fully Mindy that make me aware of where I am not yet fully Meredith. Like the part where she calls me out for being too loud or tells me yeah, you sometimes frustrate and annoy me, but I love you anyway. I'm not going to act like you don't, because it's more special that you do those things and I still love you through them.
You see, Mindy is honest to a fault. But I really only say that because it's a phrase. MIndy is honest, but not always to a fault, just honest as we all should be honest – and sometimes, though I've seen the movie a hundred times at this point and might detest its predictability, her honesty jars something in my head that reminds me that I am not as honest as I should like to be.
And though I've seen it before, the movie inspires me again.
Then there are times the movie takes me completely by surprise even though I know the characters like the back of my hand; I think the director is just wild.
Sometimes I'm utterly convinced it's a comedy and that I'm the butt of all the jokes, that there is an imaginary audience laughing at the way I seem to occasionally know what's going on. I think those days are the ones where I resent the movie the most, perhaps because it's those days that I know myself to be a work-in-progress most fully and am forced into laughing at myself or dying on the spot. Laughing at yourself is an ironic task to master; you must learn to laugh just hard enough not to cry, otherwise your laughter may well turn into the kind of revelatory cry where you're suddenly spattering your life's deepest disappointments onto an unsuspecting friend's face over a third glass of wine you shouldn't have ordered.
There are other days the movie seems to be a drama. Sometimes it's the good kind that makes your heart beat fast, your head swoon for the main characters in their love story, the kind that makes you remember how beautiful eternity really will be through a fleeting glimpse of God's heart for story. Then there are the days when it's just Days of Our Lives and you're begging someone to switch the DVD before you lose any more brain cells, yet finding yourself gluttonously unable to stop watching.
As I was saying, though – what the movie has made me realize quite often is how many things I wish my character were that it is not.
I wish I were more thoughtful and remembered everything anyone told me about their emotional and spiritual struggles so that I could ask them in just the right moments about those things and be that character that everyone wishes were their best friend.
I wish I were more gentle in speech, a lamb with human skin on, meek and humble and all things shy and coy and inviting, warm in every way. A perfect sweetheart that every audience member wants to marry off their oldest son to.
I wish I were the character with well-managed emotions in every situation, rational and intentional and level-headed, cool as a cucumber when things got hot and spicy.
But really, I'm just not those things, and I'm reaching this new place where I'm learning to appreciate my role for what it is. Maybe I'm not Mindy, but at my truest I'm inspirational in my own ways, I'm sure.
And just like the other characters must be themselves to inspire me, I can only hope to do the same. So while I'm learning lots of things I wish my character were while watching this movie, I'm beginning to notice one of the biggest plot twists for the first time – that my character in the World Race movie isn't quite who she thought she was at the start, and while she's not turning into the other characters, she is becoming who the director had hoped she'd be.
It's those twists and Mindy's kind of inspiration that make the movie worth re-watching.
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