I must be watching too many movies. Or reading too many books. There’s not too much trouble with this scenario but the fact that watching movies, reading books and hearing stories shift your way of thinking. You listen to enough stories, and after a while you start to think life works similarly to the stories you’ve been listening to.
I headed home for Easter weekend a few days early to see a good friend who, only two days prior, had broken up with her long-distance boyfriend of about two years. It had been first love for the both of them, and the breakup was especially painful because it was so caring, a paradoxical “I don’t want to hurt you” scenario. Stumbling and hurting in the wake of this new end, my friend quickly began to look at other pieces of her life and concluded she was, upsettingly, “lost” in all aspects of life.
Not knowing what to say or how to offer genuinely believable comfort, I found myself tempted to assure my heartbroken friend that comfort was coming. “I know you’re hurting, but don’t worry. It’ll all turn out — everything will work out.”
Where do we get that idea? What voice tells us all will, in fact, be well? It’s not so wrong to think “things will turn out,” because they often do. Our roads may not always take the turns we want them to, but eventually we end up in a good enough place.
The trouble in this comes along the way. Somewhere after we start, we become lost, unknowing and worried about where the end is. Movies, books and songs don’t have this problem. People within those stories may get lost along the way, but at the end of the set two hours, a resolution has been reached. The end is found. Lostness, in whatever form it may appear, is gone.
In reality, being “lost” is much more disquieting and uncomfortable. We’ve all been or will be there at some point. But even in the unknown of real life, the beauty in being lost is that, inherently, at some point you too become found. Lostness fades, then ends. Pain diminishes, then disappears. Both probably return too, but the cycle of coming-and-going persists. You can be lost, hurt, dejected, rejected and confused at different points and in different ways, but no matter the specifics of the story, the unwanted feeling does, at some point, become gone.
When going through, say, a breakup, we want immediate healing — an immediate response, a rebound, a reaction. Quick, fast, over. This is understandable, as there’s less pain that way. We often want an answer that solves the short-term issue, but sometimes, the short-term isn’t so short. The pain of that breakup lasts longer than desired because, in certain instances, there is no immediate fix. We have to wait. “Things turn out” somewhere between here and the end of the line, but rarely does that turning out happen right when we want or expect it to.
That right there is the problem with reading too many books, watching too many movies, with stories told through some artistic medium. There’s a clear start to both experience and emotion — it’s when the director screams “action,” when the writer puts pen to paper, when the musician strums her guitar. There’s also, however, a stop to those things — “cut,” “the end,” “thank you!”
We seek comfort in movies and books and music because they tell relatable stories that focus on the short term. In some small time span, the story is said and done, the pain has come and gone, the happiness has returned. We get to experience all we want to and through that medium. We get to see that things really do, as they say, “turn out.”
Of course, it’d be silly to suggest that all stories have happy endings. But all stories have resolutions. All stories have take-aways, points, lessons learned. One may not like or agree with the ending given, but one can still discern something from the way things ended up. Problems, roadblocks, obstacles throughout life don’t always work like that, because the various events that unfold throughout our lives don’t often end neatly, with crisp wrapping paper and a shiny bow around the box. That’s undeniably frustrating for us who are stuck in the white space, that lost Somewhere between start and finish. But the span of a life is longer than any individual story told in a movie, book or song, and thus, we don’t get to see the end product until the end. That’s not such a terrible thing as being lost may seem.
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