I refuse to admit that fall is in the air. I’m not ready for pumpkin spice and colourful leaves crunching underfoot and cozy sweaters and Thanksgivoween. I am still planning the vacation I will take when the smoke clears and I remember what my name is and where I live. Today we feature the last of our Drive In Movie Musings, where we draw on brilliant scenes from films to illustrate emotional teachings. School has never been so amusing.
Divergent is one of the dystopian films like The Hunger Games and also The 2021 News. And I am going to talk to you about it, in just a few paragraphs, but first a bonus feature!!!
There was this plain ordinary TV show a few years back before The End Times and stuff called Once Upon a Time wherein talented actors play fairy tale characters living in a town where there is no magic, basically what we call daily life. Anyhow in their quest to understand themselves and find their way back home and reclaim their magic, all kinds of crazy things go down. In one particular episode they are beset by “The Curse of Shattered Sight”. Friends and beloveds and neighbours can no longer see one another through the lens of love, instead they see through fear. They imagine ill-intentions; they become critical of those quirks they once celebrated. There is a scene at the town jail where Prince Charming and Snow White are bickering in a crowd of towns folk who are also bickering and then they break up. We feel the hurt, man, ‘cause we’ve been there. We have had break ups. BUT we, The Audience are also like this is so dumb, you know she loves you, you know he didn’t mean that by his comment, you know she would never, because as The Audience we have a wider lens. WE CAN SEE TRUTH for solidly 48 minutes at a time. But the conflict takes on a life of it’s own and it lights all of the dead brush on fire and the winds of fear fan the flames across the land until the fire is out of control, and our make believe town who has lost all of its make believe is in ruin.
TA DA! There you have The World, my sweet Friend. I know it’s sounds kinda doomsday of me, even for actual doomsday, which, well if you’ve looked outside lately… But here is the point of all of this.
Once upon a time, we, like the townsfolk of Storybrooke looked through the lens of fear and nasty shit went down. Then nasty shit played dominoes and well all of that nastiness gives birth to nastiness with actual grit. If you look through the lens of fear long and hard enough you will act from fear and fear causes pain and pain causes more pain and then it’s Once Upon the End Times. So, what if our only hope of getting out of the town jail is to put down the lens of fear? To stop looking for betrayal and to look for love. To look with compassion. Once fear is stacked on centuries of fear it has created some monsters. So now we have to ask complicated questions like how do we deal with the monsters as lovingly as possible if we’re going get out of this hot mess. But isn’t it a question worth asking? If we have practiced fear as a precaution, if we have gone to battle with ‘the worst case’ and the ‘what if’ for long enough to experience full on full blown pain and suffering, what if we practice THE OPPOSITE?
I know you think I’m going to break out into a chorus of Kumbaya, don a crown of Sunflowers to compliment my rose coloured sunglasses and trade the wine for Kombucha (I would never). It’s just that I know better. Fear dresses up in the leather jacket and greases back their hair and gets all of the hot dates but Love is playing the long game. Love is the nerd you make fun of for a few years while they become the billionaire. I want you to give Love a chance.
But it’s hard. I know. You don’t wanna be nice when the world is not playing nice and you can’t tell who’s even on your side.
Is there a HACK you can give me Erin, to help me get my shattered sight un-shattered you ask, so I don’t get pulled into petty ego conflict nastiness that makes me feel I have to defend myself or counter attack every time someone cuts me off in traffic, or I turn on the news or I open my inbox? What if I don’t have time to meditate or visit an ashram or grow a flower garden in my heart because I never get a day GD day off?
Well yes Friend and this brings me to our Feature Film. Let me introduce you to the cast of Divergent; by which I really mean one bad ass young adult Shailene Woodley. Shailene lives in the future and the future is not so bright. Humans are categorized by the government into categories, of all things, based on their essential character. These five character ‘factions’ include Erudite (smarty pants); Amity (peace lovin’ hippies) Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (brave), and Candor (honesty best policy). Sounds like a simpler world, right? Only having to focus on one thing, phew sounds like a holiday. But wait! Tris (Shailene) tests positive in three categories and gets a warning not to let anyone know that she is “Divergent” (gasp) –a freak of nature who can character mulit-task. It sounds super cool and special but turns out no one likes a keener, not even in dystopia. Being Divergent is seen as a threat to government control of the masses and so on. So, Tris chooses Dauntless at the choosing ceremony where you like can choose any path in spite of your testing as long as you pick one thing and commit. And she pretends she is not Divergent.
Forward forward forward, Tris is in brave chick training and she is tough but training is fierce and brave people are mean and stupid (in the movie, at least some of them). There is a lot of sprinting and jumping and fighting and looking bad ass which is pretty much what I am gonna do after this #Monday. Then we get to the mind bending fear simulator. WHAT!??? You say. A fear simulator??! Yes. This is how they test you. You take a drug and basically your mind creates a virtual reality of your worst fear and you have to get out of it. HOW you get out of it reveals your faction. So they are testing her bravery factor to see how it’s coming along since she chose a different faction than her fam jam (please bear with my messy plot recap).
The key scene here is Tris, our protagonist, in a drug induced fear simulation in a glass tank, and the tank is filling with water, and the water is getting closer and closer to her face which means she is gonna drown soon unless she does something. What would a brave chick do, a dauntless chick who runs at top speeds in black pants and sexy tank (not what I will be sporting on my run today)? I dunno, maybe use brute force or some such thing, but she does not. She looks with curiosity at the enclosure and in that desperate near-death moment she starts tapping the glass, lightly, with one finger. AND THE GLASS STARTS TO CRACK. It cracks and then it breaks open and then she is free and then she wakes up. Tris mind ninja’d her way out of drowning, out of the ILLUSION of drowning. In that moment when fear was gripping her at the throat, when she was like this will kill me and most of us would start beating on the glass there was an instant of willingness in which she listened to a voice that told her to question her reality. Tap the glass. See what happens.
TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS FOUR, FRIENDS.
The lens of fear tells us that someone else or something else has power over us. That we are under attack and it elicits an attack response within us; we must defend ourselves, we must overcome the threat to us, but what if the threat we see in everyone and all around us is just the curse of shattered sight –like after it’s gone on WAY too long? What if instead of giving MORE POWER away, to fear and powerlessness we just listen for an instant to that voice that says this harm isn’t real. Even if it feels really real now. What if there is a way out, and that way out is not to dig in deeper? What if we consider for a instant that we may be looking through thousands of veils but that the veils like the simulated drowning tank don’t really have power and we just give one tiny tiny speck of willingness to the possibility that they don’t. Instead of buying in, instead of doing that very thing that fear of powerlessness tells us we should do (get angry, get righteous, overcome, fight, flight, cry out against), what if we TAP THE GLASS?
Might we feel better, calmer, safer right then and there?
What if the next time someone hurts us, or attacks us, or threatens us, or fails us, I mean emotionally I am not suggesting we let someone whack us over the head, we turn tables. Tap the glass. Look for the faulty edges in the enclosure, the transparency of the wall, the illusoriness.
What if we practice being The Audience and we wait to be shown the real story.
Stay the adult to their scared inner child.
Might the Lion become the Lamb?
Maybe the first time he just gets a thorn in paw and doesn’t eat us.
But over time we end up sitting in a boat with him across an entire ocean voyage and neither one of us gets eaten or drowns and by the end we’re not sure he ever was a lion! WAIT, that sounds like a feature for next summer, 30 pumpkin lattes, a bag of mini chocolate bars, some plum pudding fruitcake and a few chocolate bunnies from now.
shit happens but we can fix it and feel so much better when we do. Life doesn’t have to feel this hard. LOVE doesn’t have to feel this hard.
I refuse to admit that fall is in the air. I’m not ready for pumpkin spice and colourful leaves crunching underfoot and cozy sweaters and Thanksgivoween. I am still planning the vacation I will take when the smoke clears and I remember what my name is and where I live. Today we feature the last of our Drive In Movie Musings, where we draw on brilliant scenes from films to illustrate emotional teachings. School has never been so amusing.
Divergent is one of the dystopian films like The Hunger Games and also The 2021 News. And I am going to talk to you about it, in just a few paragraphs, but first a bonus feature!!!
There was this plain ordinary TV show a few years back before The End Times and stuff called Once Upon a Time wherein talented actors play fairy tale characters living in a town where there is no magic, basically what we call daily life. Anyhow in their quest to understand themselves and find their way back home and reclaim their magic, all kinds of crazy things go down. In one particular episode they are beset by “The Curse of Shattered Sight”. Friends and beloveds and neighbours can no longer see one another through the lens of love, instead they see through fear. They imagine ill-intentions; they become critical of those quirks they once celebrated. There is a scene at the town jail where Prince Charming and Snow White are bickering in a crowd of towns folk who are also bickering and then they break up. We feel the hurt, man, ‘cause we’ve been there. We have had break ups. BUT we, The Audience are also like this is so dumb, you know she loves you, you know he didn’t mean that by his comment, you know she would never, because as The Audience we have a wider lens. WE CAN SEE TRUTH for solidly 48 minutes at a time. But the conflict takes on a life of it’s own and it lights all of the dead brush on fire and the winds of fear fan the flames across the land until the fire is out of control, and our make believe town who has lost all of its make believe is in ruin.
TA DA! There you have The World, my sweet Friend. I know it’s sounds kinda doomsday of me, even for actual doomsday, which, well if you’ve looked outside lately… But here is the point of all of this.
Once upon a time, we, like the townsfolk of Storybrooke looked through the lens of fear and nasty shit went down. Then nasty shit played dominoes and well all of that nastiness gives birth to nastiness with actual grit. If you look through the lens of fear long and hard enough you will act from fear and fear causes pain and pain causes more pain and then it’s Once Upon the End Times. So, what if our only hope of getting out of the town jail is to put down the lens of fear? To stop looking for betrayal and to look for love. To look with compassion. Once fear is stacked on centuries of fear it has created some monsters. So now we have to ask complicated questions like how do we deal with the monsters as lovingly as possible if we’re going get out of this hot mess. But isn’t it a question worth asking? If we have practiced fear as a precaution, if we have gone to battle with ‘the worst case’ and the ‘what if’ for long enough to experience full on full blown pain and suffering, what if we practice THE OPPOSITE?
I know you think I’m going to break out into a chorus of Kumbaya, don a crown of Sunflowers to compliment my rose coloured sunglasses and trade the wine for Kombucha (I would never). It’s just that I know better. Fear dresses up in the leather jacket and greases back their hair and gets all of the hot dates but Love is playing the long game. Love is the nerd you make fun of for a few years while they become the billionaire. I want you to give Love a chance.
But it’s hard. I know. You don’t wanna be nice when the world is not playing nice and you can’t tell who’s even on your side.
Is there a HACK you can give me Erin, to help me get my shattered sight un-shattered you ask, so I don’t get pulled into petty ego conflict nastiness that makes me feel I have to defend myself or counter attack every time someone cuts me off in traffic, or I turn on the news or I open my inbox? What if I don’t have time to meditate or visit an ashram or grow a flower garden in my heart because I never get a day GD day off?
Well yes Friend and this brings me to our Feature Film. Let me introduce you to the cast of Divergent; by which I really mean one bad ass young adult Shailene Woodley. Shailene lives in the future and the future is not so bright. Humans are categorized by the government into categories, of all things, based on their essential character. These five character ‘factions’ include Erudite (smarty pants); Amity (peace lovin’ hippies) Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (brave), and Candor (honesty best policy). Sounds like a simpler world, right? Only having to focus on one thing, phew sounds like a holiday. But wait! Tris (Shailene) tests positive in three categories and gets a warning not to let anyone know that she is “Divergent” (gasp) –a freak of nature who can character mulit-task. It sounds super cool and special but turns out no one likes a keener, not even in dystopia. Being Divergent is seen as a threat to government control of the masses and so on. So, Tris chooses Dauntless at the choosing ceremony where you like can choose any path in spite of your testing as long as you pick one thing and commit. And she pretends she is not Divergent.
Forward forward forward, Tris is in brave chick training and she is tough but training is fierce and brave people are mean and stupid (in the movie, at least some of them). There is a lot of sprinting and jumping and fighting and looking bad ass which is pretty much what I am gonna do after this #Monday. Then we get to the mind bending fear simulator. WHAT!??? You say. A fear simulator??! Yes. This is how they test you. You take a drug and basically your mind creates a virtual reality of your worst fear and you have to get out of it. HOW you get out of it reveals your faction. So they are testing her bravery factor to see how it’s coming along since she chose a different faction than her fam jam (please bear with my messy plot recap).
The key scene here is Tris, our protagonist, in a drug induced fear simulation in a glass tank, and the tank is filling with water, and the water is getting closer and closer to her face which means she is gonna drown soon unless she does something. What would a brave chick do, a dauntless chick who runs at top speeds in black pants and sexy tank (not what I will be sporting on my run today)? I dunno, maybe use brute force or some such thing, but she does not. She looks with curiosity at the enclosure and in that desperate near-death moment she starts tapping the glass, lightly, with one finger. AND THE GLASS STARTS TO CRACK. It cracks and then it breaks open and then she is free and then she wakes up. Tris mind ninja’d her way out of drowning, out of the ILLUSION of drowning. In that moment when fear was gripping her at the throat, when she was like this will kill me and most of us would start beating on the glass there was an instant of willingness in which she listened to a voice that told her to question her reality. Tap the glass. See what happens.
TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS FOUR, FRIENDS.
The lens of fear tells us that someone else or something else has power over us. That we are under attack and it elicits an attack response within us; we must defend ourselves, we must overcome the threat to us, but what if the threat we see in everyone and all around us is just the curse of shattered sight –like after it’s gone on WAY too long? What if instead of giving MORE POWER away, to fear and powerlessness we just listen for an instant to that voice that says this harm isn’t real. Even if it feels really real now. What if there is a way out, and that way out is not to dig in deeper? What if we consider for a instant that we may be looking through thousands of veils but that the veils like the simulated drowning tank don’t really have power and we just give one tiny tiny speck of willingness to the possibility that they don’t. Instead of buying in, instead of doing that very thing that fear of powerlessness tells us we should do (get angry, get righteous, overcome, fight, flight, cry out against), what if we TAP THE GLASS?
Might we feel better, calmer, safer right then and there?
What if the next time someone hurts us, or attacks us, or threatens us, or fails us, I mean emotionally I am not suggesting we let someone whack us over the head, we turn tables. Tap the glass. Look for the faulty edges in the enclosure, the transparency of the wall, the illusoriness.
What if we practice being The Audience and we wait to be shown the real story.
Stay the adult to their scared inner child.
Might the Lion become the Lamb?
Maybe the first time he just gets a thorn in paw and doesn’t eat us.
But over time we end up sitting in a boat with him across an entire ocean voyage and neither one of us gets eaten or drowns and by the end we’re not sure he ever was a lion! WAIT, that sounds like a feature for next summer, 30 pumpkin lattes, a bag of mini chocolate bars, some plum pudding fruitcake and a few chocolate bunnies from now.
Much love,
Erin
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P.S. 2021 I am bringing on the love. I’ll be featured in a podcast all about better loving, from healing your broken heart to intentional dating to creating a relationship that thrives, and I’ll be launching a sister site for all of you relationship and love enthusiasts, with all kinds of insights and offerings. Stay tuned!
P.P.S. One of the kindest things you can do for me is to share my writing. If you enjoyed today’s Monday Musing and know someone else who would please forward it to a friend.
P.P.P.S. You can also follow me on Instagram, for real time updates, funnies and photos! Much love,
— Erin
P.S. 2021 I am bringing on the love. I’ll be featured in a podcast all about better loving, from healing your broken heart to intentional dating to creating a relationship that thrives, and I’ll be launching a sister site for all of you relationship and love enthusiasts, with all kinds of insights and offerings. Stay tuned!
P.P.S. One of the kindest things you can do for me is to share my writing. If you enjoyed today’s Monday Musing and know someone else who would please forward it to a friend.
P.P.P.S. You can also follow me on Instagram, for real time updates, funnies and photos!
