Learning my lesson...

To continue musing about my new inspiration, M. Night, it seems a bit absurd to me the fact that I am having to go back and rewatch movies that I have hated in the past. Garden State, The Green Mile, and now Signs. I find it more than interesting that when I first watched them I had the exact same eyes that I do now, I saw the exact same images, heard the exact same sounds, yet, took from them a different vision. In remembering my initial experiences, I noticed that I took one thing from each movie- a specific thing, and used it as my reasoning that the movie sucked. With Garden State, it was the gross sex scene; The Green Mile was completely unrealistic with the bugs flying out of the dude's mouth; and with Signs, I didn't like that they showed the aliens. I thought they should have had more of an invisible mystique. Each of these individual things that I chose to pull from these movies lasted a matter of seconds, compared to the entire movie's length. And, that is what I chose to take from them.

Now, going back and watching each of these movies, I don't take specific scenes or even characters with me. I take lessons. Each of them has a theme interwoven among its words and imagery that is more powerful than any one part of it. It's the whole thing that makes it beautiful and meaningful. No longer will I look at the tiny; I will focus on the big.

I think it is the same thing with people. When you take one tiny thing, maybe something they did or something about their personality or belief system, and make that who they are, you miss the lesson. We are each so much more than any one slice of ourselves. To learn from each other, we have got to see the whole. We all have a lesson to teach. The way we teach it does not matter. The specifics do not matter. It is the lesson that is important. And, we must make a conscious effort to take these lessons from each other.


I spent the afternoon roaming the streets of St. Augustine taking photos of "interesting" people. Here is number one.