Raison d’etre

We have to give our lives meaning, life itself has no meaning otherwise. We feel better about ourselves if we are doing something with our time. When work gets busy, it gives us a sense of purpose because we are occupied and we are functioning. I generally do not feel good when I while away my time. I must have been conditioned to feel that way. How often we say time flies and before we know it, a week is gone and then it is another week, another month, another year has gone by. We live the life we think we are living, we become the persons we have grown to be . Given a different set of circumstances, you wonder if you would not be the same person whom you think you are? So long as we are still living, we can still learn, evolve and get to know ourselves. You are the purpose of living.

I came across these two quotes today:

‘If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.’ – Oscar Wilde

‘Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it – that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun‘. –Stephen Fry

Maybe life is not about who you want to be. If you have made up your mind about what you want to be, you stop dreaming about other possibilities. I often find that everyone around me seems to know what they are doing. I show up at the office and there are days when I get a lot of work done, there are also days I hardly get any work done. That’s just how it has been for me.

In March this year , I caught Living, the English drama film directed by Oliver Hermanus that was screening at a local bookshop.The film was adapted from Ikiru (To Live), a film by Akira Kurosawa, which itself was an adaptation of the novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. The screenplay is by Kazuo Ishiguro and Bill Nighy takes the role of the leading man. Bill Nighy was in About Time, a whimsical movie where the protagonist finds out that the men in his family can time travel and Bill Nighy plays the protagonist’s dad who travels back in time to spend more time with his family and re-read the books that he has read. But they cannot change history.

In Living, Williams, the head of the Public Works Department, receives a terminal health
diagnosis and is told that he only has six to nine months to live. He wants to take his life but decides that he cannot go through with taking those sleeping pills. After taking time off work for two to three weeks , he gets over the shock and begins taking stock in his life and trying to be the best person he can before he goes. The story is set in post-war London in 1953. The film is essentially about Williams’ coming of age at a senior age as he has a rude awakening
that he has since become a powerless cog in civil service. When he feels that
nothing can be done, he shafts the file underneath a stack of files and say: We can keep it here. It can do no harm.It is interesting that certain pattern of behaviour of those working in the public service departments appears to be universal and ever present regardless of the
era we are in . No matter where you live in the world , you have to contend with the bureaucracy in your city. In Living , three women are sent from department to department when all they want is to submit an application for certain planning permits to convert a bomb site into a children’s playground. Williams decides to take the matter into his own hands and helps these ladies to realize their plan. Williams quips, ‘ I don’t have time to get angry.’

Indeed time is too precious to be spent on anger or regret or any emotion that is counterproductive.What is hard is changing our attitudes when faced with circumstances that we cannot change. Quite often we cannot change a situation we can only change our attitude.

I was  truly glad to have caught the film. It is one of those films that will move you to tears if you want a good cry. Every now and then we need a good cry.

Some months ago, I watched Drive my car that was adapted from one of Haruki Murakami‘s short stories by the same title. It is a three hours long film and although the short story provided the basic plot, it had to be expanded by adding back stories to the characters.

Yûsuke Kafuku, a theater actor learns his lines by listening to the tapes recorded by his wife, Oto while driving his Saab 900 Turbo. He finds out that his wife is having affairs but before he can confront her about her multiple affairs, she is found dead . On that fateful day, Oto asks to have a serious conversation with him, he chooses to take his time to go home. He returns home too late to find her collapsing from cerebral hemorrhage . Two years later, Kafuku accepts a residency in Hiroshima to direct a multilingual production of an adaptation of Uncle Vanya, a play by Anton Chekhov. He is required to be chauffeured around for insurance reasons. Misaki Watari, a young reserved driver is hired. Both Kafuku and Watari gradually share their stories and learn to come to terms with their pasts. Kafuku griefs over the loss of his wife and their child . Watari lost her mother in a landslide and she feels guilty for not having saved her. She had hated her mother who could be cruel to her . Her mother appeared to have splitting personalities. After beating her up, her mother becomes Sachi an eight year old who acts like her only friend. Life was hard for both of them.

Drive my car is an excellent film about love, loss and dealing with one’s past.