Well, here I am writing in Doha Airport. It’s 3am, I haven’t had any sleep for the night and I sit here with my coffee overlooking a tropical garden located within the airport. It’s a nice, peaceful place. There is water running and the sound of birds. And unlike many other airports, Doha seems to keep running through the whole day and night. That has enabled me to sit quietly and reflect, as I often like to do. It just so happens that I have something interesting to reflect on.
During flights, I like to watch movies. This time I managed to watch something particularly interesting. It was a film called Let Them All Talk. The scenes are very natural, and the story line is very loose and untied. Much like life. But there was one monologue in the film that I’d like to share, and that makes the film worth watching. The central character, Alice Hughes (played by Meryl Streep), is a writer struggling to finish her latest novel. She talks with her nephew over breakfast one day, her nephew who had fallen in love with an older woman but had been rejected. She consoles him by explaining:
You shouldn’t be shy with attraction to someone. Attraction is the animating force in the universe.
Gravity. What pulls the monarch butterflies to fly across the world.
If you feel attracted to someone, from your heart, and you look at them and you feel you can see their soul, there is no bad version of that. To wanna be part of that. We should treasure it. We’re lucky to have that feeling. It’s the greatest, the fullest expression of what it is to be alive.
That portion of the film spoke to me because in many ways this has been the internal journey that I am making alongside my travel around the world. Most people are not a stranger to unrequited love or unreciprocated feelings, whether it is romantic or not. It’s a difficult thing to deal with, because it causes shame, embarrassment… it closes us off from one of the pleasures of life. We start out as a child, so able to act on our attractions spontaneously and without fear… but over time the fear grows, and we become more cautious, more conservative with what we are willing to act on.
I feel that this is because we learn to use our actions for the purpose of getting a result… the only thing is that we cannot control what the outcome or result of an action looks like. We can only control how we perceive it. Instead of just enjoying the feeling of being attracted to something or someone, we look towards what the path should look like on our way to achieving a certain outcome. Our enjoyment of our own feelings then becomes dependent on others. If the path to what we want doesn’t seem acceptable to us, then we begin to fear what negative things could happen and act for the sake of protection. We miss out on being open to all the possibilities that exist and acting for the sake of enjoying being alive.
I think that’s what I’ve been doing with my writing for so long. I would write for hours when I was younger. Poetry, stories… my work even got recognised as being good once. But all it took was a few discouraging teachers, a few negative comments from friends, and then I started to cut myself off from this passion. The fault was not with the others, it’s with how I chose to perceive their opinions. It’s taken me years, but I finally feel that I’m getting back the courage to simply act for the purpose of enjoyment rather than approval or achievement. People are easy to advise others to follow their dream, to disregard the opinions of others, but how much do we actually apply this advice to our own life?
This film reminds me that it takes courage to act on our attractions, whether it’s to people or other things. It’s a courage that requires honesty with yourself, and clarity over what it is that you truly want in life. Hughes jokingly asks her nephew, as their conversation comes to a close, so… are you going to try asking her out again? He laughs and shakes his head. Perhaps it’s too early. When we act on our attractions, we get to know more about ourselves and we get clearer on what we want. It’s then easier for us to make the choice… do we want to continue down this path or are we ready to open ourselves to something new?
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