The movie

"The unexamined life is not worth living... "(Socrates, in Plato, Dialogues, Apology)

I always love the metaphor of actors and movies because we can watch a movie, a good movie, and be so moved and inspired by the performances that sometimes is hard to believe it is a movie. We can tell straight away a good movie from the bad movie. Sometimes we get so wrapped up with the characters, we take in their pain as if it was ours... and whenever we remember the movie it can get us to tears...as if we were seeing it again.

An example comes to mind:  my grandmother watching the Spanish soap operas and hating, of course, the mean girl. Disliking her completely, so much that no matter what other soap operas the woman does, by grandmother still does not like her, in her own words 'That girl is not a good person, she hurt a lot of people'. I tried to explain to my grandmother that it was just her role... but well... 

Perhaps in our lives we were given the script, let's call it 'Survival'. And in this script there are bad guys and good guys, there are the extras, there's me as the main actor and then, surely, there should also be the guy I fall in love with and live happily ever after. Well that is if he is one of the good guys, if he's one of the baddies than my happiness will have to wait.

And maybe that's how we see ourselves, our lives, like a movie, and we can identify all the characters and their roles and what they stand for. There's only one problem, we enact it so well, sometimes we forget that we can take on other roles, play different movies. Like my grandmother, we can't dissociate ourselves from the character we play.

And we believe that we are the person in the story and we follow it through. Because if we are not that person then who are we?

I'm not quite done formulating my theory, but maybe, when we can no longer tell the difference between the role we play and who we are, then here is the moment when something happens. And this is my proposal. We begin believing that 'there's only one side to who we are'. Then we start thinking that if we are a female character than we should behave like the script tells us to, and if we are a male character then we should behave like the script tells you to. Whatever other dimension of  being we have that does not fit into the script it needs to be 'dropped.' Like when we become adults and forget the child we once were. Or like a dog who learns new tricks. And then yes, then we can finally begin building on the 'A type' the one in the script, the one that is generally accepted.


The only thing is that you can't 'drop' being, you can't 'drop existence'. So something happens in our mind, in our brilliant mind. It stores it. It's all stored. Like in a warehouse, or a big library with old books. And sometimes, this 'being' that does not fit in the script comes out. It does so because it's alive, and it's still growing, it continues growing every time we 'drop it'.
And I'm going to call this 'being' Freedom, the one that is natural, without script, the rebel.

So, we're so busy trying to perform the role of our lives that we forget to lock the door of the library, and Freedom, like a child comes out to play. Only very quietly because it can't be noticed. It does not fit with the script, so it sneaks. And when it's out it has to wear different disguises, my favouritte one is Creativity.

And it laughs too, because we don't know it's out. And does amazing things, like movies, construes completely different lives, paints, sings, speaks different languages, dresses differently and it tells amazing stories. And every times it's out it leaves traces, seeds of hinting very subtly that we already have the ability to become anything we imagine. We don't need to practice.

But our script is powerful, it started from the day we were born. Early on we are enroled in the character we are to become. We are told that there's 'the right way to be' and we believe this. And we go through our lives chasing after our tails, feeling bad because we're not good enough, we're not this, we're not that. Hell. And we keep 'dropping' and 'dropping' our being, trying hard to be the character that we are not and rejecting the one we are. And we drop some more, until one day there's no more to drop. And we can finally tell the great story of our lives, the one where we didn't even exist.


We have eyes that don't see, mouths that don't speak and ears that don't hear but there is hope, we still have Freedom.

Imagine if we were told from the beginning that we could be anything and given the tools to be anything. If our script was different....

Imagine.

 Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world