I took my younger brother to watch the the movie Life of Pi. Now if you haven’t read anything by me before please be patient with this post as there is quite a lot to it. We leave for the movie and since movie theaters never have the right things, we brought the snacks along with us ( you try to find arnold palmer lemonade in the theater). I read the book a few years ago and I loved the book as I was in a phase where I spent a lot of time reading shipwreck novels. Being out on the sea, alone, held a symbolic parallel with how I viewed life when reading it. I began to see life very much as a solo mission, not because I was abandoned or because of some traumatic event but just because the coming and going of friends, the coming and going of the years passing by, and the lack of consistency is what drew me to the loneliness of the shipwreck that I could relate to.
I wont spoil a thing about the film so do not worry if you haven’t seen it yet. But one theme of the novel and subsequently the film was faith. I will not delve into the long story of how I became a Muslim but I will give insight on some of the things that drew me to believe in a higher power. Because you are never alway around someone, at some point in your life you will experience loneliness. When I say that, I don’t mean it in a depressing connotation, but it is more of a reflective, independent state, that you enter when you are alone. I was raised to be very independent, to go search for answers myself, and to figure things out on my own. My strongest social connections to this date are my brother, mother, and father. That is just how I was brought up. All of the friends I have had have been temporary in a sense and they come and go, and although I have plenty of people I talk to regularly, I realize that at the end of the day my independence is the thing I turn to. To fast forward a bit, my quest for finding the answers to more worldly questions that would pass my tests of logic and interrogation is what lead me to believe in the religion I am a part of today. Faith became a cane to lean on, to depend on, a cane that would never leave my side, even if when I rested my head on my bed alone at night where no other soul could hear my thoughts, I knew that there was a higher power out there.
This movie reminded me of how fleeting things can be, life, family, food, water, shelter, can all be gone in the blink of an eye and your level of appreciation of what you have left will be unlike any appreciation you had before. And with all of these things as variables, and as I began to become more mature I have found constants in faith and in the world around me. Not to say that everything in my life is perfect but I am trying to make the best out of everything and this movie reminded me of how important it can be to never loose hope.
My brother (just turned 17) absolutely loved the movie and was raving about it as we walked home (interesting because I was a year younger then him when I read it). We got home and he went on to watching an anime and I could not stop thinking about how beautiful a simple story can be. I love that now I have a simple outlet to tell stories of my own (and hopefully I get better at telling the stories). As I was sitting on my bed trying to come up with a cool idea for a unique logo my mother walks in and we start having a very mother-son conversation. I mean, it was very text book but at the same time it was very relevant. I am very close to my mother in that as I got older she became more of an advisor then a mother and her ability to be both at the same time and be so good at it is something I will never fully comprehend. But after watching that movie and after having some serious stress from school and relationship related stuff her advice was a beautiful complement to the movie. The film discussed the faith in life and what amazed me was that my mother focused her efforts of our talk on the observation of life.
Without her knowing that my blog was about picking things up from life she kept telling me to learn from every experience. But more then that, she told me something interesting about relationships and life in general. She talked about how in her marriage with my father how it is essential to set up ground rules for the relationship to last her. The two qualities that were highest on her priority list were respect and trust. I thought love would be up there on the list but she said that these two become the foundation for the relationship.
The conversation flowed into how important it is to learn from life. She told me how when she had me she was learning everything for the first time and with every year I grew she would read up as much as she could from the library to give her piece of mind on what to expect. She would learn from her life in addition to anything she could pick up along the way. She said that from the outside you could see more then when you are under stress in the situation, she also mentioned how important it is to learn from your mistakes. I suppose the majority of it was a reminder but I appreciated every word because no matter how many times I hear it I forget and I suppose that is why im staying up so late writing this, because at the end of the day the purpose of my blog is to learn from life and to benefit from it while having fun along the way. Goodnight reader and I hope I didn’t bore you to death :)
Search for what you need to know, and I’ll try to take that wisdom as I go…
Wisdom As I Go 