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Groundhog Day - The Movie
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In the movie Groundhog Day, the protagonist Phil Connors played by
Bill Murray, wakes up into the same day, day after day after day,
every day. It's a simple concept, one which is actually and
deceptively quite
brilliant.
This essay is my
reflection
on it.
Its premise is life is the same over and over and over
again and again and again
and again and again and again.
But wait: isn't that what life does seem like? And
when you consider it, isn't that aspect of life disconcerting and
bizarre, not to mention futile? So is
God
a prankster? No. But even if she were, there's a possible
access
here, a powerful opening maybe yet to be discovered.
It's never really sat right with me that real life would be
disconcerting and bizarre and
futile. But even when it did seem that way, blaming it never
worked either. Rather, I assumed there was something I was missing.
What that was, I didn't yet know. All I knew was that the notion of
Life itself
as disconcerting and bizarre and futile, just didn't sit right with
me. So I stopped being its judge, and instead looked to see if I
could come up with what I was missing. In
conversations
with Werner,
I gradually began entertaining the possibility of
natural
knowing
ie a way of knowing the material in an entirely new way, rather
than the way I'd known anything until then. Until then, I only knew
something in order to succeed, in order to be (and do)
better than ... in other words: in order to survive. That wasn't
knowing: it was simply using the material to my
advantage (I only got that much later).
Transformation
gives an
access
to ie is a
portal
to
natural knowing.
What
transformation
brings to the table is the context in which life
occurs as the same play over and over and over
again and again and again
and again and again and again.
It's the context of who I am to whom it all shows up.
Without it, life is indeed disconcerting and bizarre and futile.
With it, the exact same material and occurrences suddenly become
dramatically, vividly, and magically open,
brilliant,
opportune, and awesome (by "it" - as in "without it"
and "with it" - I'm penning a double entendre which
pivots both on
transformation
and on
Life itself).
Sometime after I got that, I watched Groundhog Day again. It was
just as enjoyable the second time - but with a difference: to the
second viewing I brought two new overviews. The first was: it's not
merely the day which repeats itself over and over and over
again and again and again
and again and again and again.
Life is bigger than that. It's waaay bigger than that.
It's the week, the month, the year, and even
Life itself
which repeats itself over and over and over
again and again and again
and again and again and again.
More than Groundhog Day, it could be Groundhog
Weeks or even Months or Years. The
second new overview was: without a context in which
Life itself
can show up over and over and over
again and again and again
and again and again and again,
all of it is truly disconcerting and bizarre and
futile.
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