Sometimes when I’m struggling to sleep at night, I’ll put in a film. I don’t watch a lot of TV these days, the endless choice overwhelms my capacity to choose and it brings me very little joy these days. TV used to be a social event. A show you’d all be talking about at school or my inability to keep quiet during an episode of casualty, constantly asking questions. Other than live sport we’ve lost that shared community aspect to TV, as with a lot of life in general.
The more connected we have become, also, the more disconnected we have become. Schrödinger’s society, so to speak.
Anyway, you seldom can go wrong with a Tom Hanks film, so I found the film “A man called Otto”. It was a story I’ve heard many times before in different guises, first being Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. Otto was a cantankerous old man, rude and abrupt with his neighbours. Highly demanding and with a low tolerance for others, or so it seemed.
We get to know more about the character of the man as his frequent failed suicide attempts are twinned with flashbacks to his former life, to his youth and the wife that he had recently lost. It got to me. It pulled on my heartstrings and I admit the old optical reservoirs may have breached their banks at times with the sadness of his loneliness and grief.
A grief I can resonate with, as I potter around alone in an empty house that should be being filled with joy, laughter and conversation, yet the only voice is my own and the echos from a plethora of speakers.
Life is a temporary state in the infinity of time and the universe. All shall pass, so to live and to love also means to lose and to grieve. Sometimes I wonder if it would be better never to have loved at all, to spare ourselves from the pain of grief, but a life without love is a life without meaning, a life without hope, so endure, we must.
As it turns out, Otto had rather a big heart masquerading under that hardened exterior. Both in a metaphorical and literal sense. Sometimes having a big heart exposes you to pain, disappointment and let down, especially when people you cared for deeply turn their back on you when it’s no longer convenient or advantageous to them. It would be easy to let the cynicism of the world and human nature blow that candle out but then you remember that you didn’t chose to be this person, it chose you.
So, like Otto, I must carry on. I must learn not to let the hurt of the past cloud the happiness of my future. This heart is too big to do anything else other than to love again, to feel again, and to beat again.
I would highly recommend the film, although some sort of absorbent facial napkins are essential for those of us overly endowed in the rib cage department.
