The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

I don’t know of anyone who likes growing old. Oh, most of us have made peace with it. Many of us, myself included, would not dream of going back to those unenlightened teen years. I rather like the person I have become; yet there are times…today for example with spasms in my back and joint pain, when I’d love to have a much younger body.

What if there was a clock that went backwards?

It has some appeal. I could go back to that younger body. I could go back to when my husband was still alive. Who wouldn’t like that scenario? However, the clock would keep turning and eventually it would revert back to before I even met him and then there I’d be without him again.

What if the clock only went backwards for you while the rest of the world kept going forward? What if you were born old, wrinkled and feeble and then proceeded to age backwards? It’s an interesting and intriguing thought and one that the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button explores.

Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) was born with the body of an eighty year old. He was raised in a nursing home and his first steps were taken from a wheelchair. Yet even with an old body, he still had the innocence of a child. He doesn’t come into the world with the maturity or wisdom of one who has lived those eighty years. He must still learn to speak and to walk and to read and to write.

This movie isn’t about wishing one were younger or longing for the past. It really isn’t even about living life backwards. If Benjamin had really been living life backwards then he would have gone back through the birth canal and become a fetus again. If you saw the movie, then you know that is not what happened.

No, this film did not make me want to live my life backwards, but what it did was give me a greater appreciation for aging and the elderly. Everyone loves babies and we ooh and aah whenever we see them. The old, it sadly seems, we mostly ignore. Maybe that is because babies remind us of possibility and joyous times, while the elderly remind us of where we are headed and don’t want to go.

In this movie, however, the elderly are treated with loving respect. Benjamin is raised with the elderly and we quickly see that the very old and the very young have quite a lot in common. They both need diapers. They both need help walking and eating. They both speak without monitoring or even caring whether the other person is interested. There is an elderly man in the film who had been hit by lightening 7 times during his life, and he tells people over and over and over again.

Except for aches and pains, and more life experience, the elderly are very much like infants. Perhaps that is because they are both so close to Spirit. Babies have just emerged from this other Spirit world and still remember who they are and where they came from. You can see it when you look in their eyes. The elderly know that they are almost there too, and perhaps are already hanging out sometimes in that other dimension.

While I’m not always happy with my aching, changing body, I am learning to embrace this process we call aging. I think after this movie, I will never look at the elderly quite the same again…

Telling Your Story

The importance of having a story and a dream were significant themes running throughout the movie Australia. This is something the Aborigine people fully understand; perhaps because their culture, customs and identity were constantly being threatened or taken from them.

The movie Australia is, in part, about racism. The native Aboriginal people of Australia, and especially the half-breeds were looked upon with contempt, hunted down and cast out. Therefore, it was even more important to keep their stories and pass them down generation to generation. The Bible tells us, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” (Proverbs 29:18).

This movie got me to thinking about my story. What is it? Do I even have one? Eckhart Tolle talks to us about letting go of the story. Many of us hold onto stories that don’t serve us. We hold onto stories of victimhood. Something unpleasant happens to us and we retell that story again and again and again. We let it define us. That is not the story the Aboriginal people told. Based on their history, they certainly could have harbored a victimhood story. Instead, they told stories of hope and promise. They sang their stories. I love that!

In the film there was an 11-year-old half-cast Aboriginal orphan named Nallah (Brandon Walters) who constantly had to hide from authorities. Whenever he got separated from Lady Ashley (Nicole Kidman) he would tell her, “I’ll sing you to me.” It reminded me of the movie August Rush, about another orphan who sang his parents to him. I love music and I love stories, so obviously I loved this movie! Anyway, it got me thinking once again about the power of story.

My current story is that I am unemployed looking for my right and perfect place. But that isn’t really my story. I am an adopted child, so I guess I could relate in a way with Nallah, but that isn’t really my story either. My story is that I am a wonderful, spiritual being evolving and constantly learning in this human existence, and, in turn, teaching others what I learn. That’s why I am a minister, and I guess that’s why I’ve chosen to blog…to share the story. So, what is your story? You can click on comments and tell me yours….