Waking Life
October 2, 2010
I saw this movie about eight years ago now. And, having viewed it one evening with my mother, it seemed to leave an indelible mark on my psyche… One which slowly grew, bit by bit, with every question that I asked from that day onwards… With every uncertainty procured, it bulged a bit more… With every morsel of ‘self’ concern and ‘fear’, it distended into my centre of rosy beingness… In some ways I become a bit distraught over being faced with this ‘blob’ of growing sadness… It was putting my nose out of joint… Leaving a strange after taste in my mouth of daily flavours… Thus it seemed that the real world was slowly but surely giving way to a distorted view of things… Things that I had taken for granted and presumed would never change… And that left me somewhat detached from my usually daily routines, not to mention my friends… Even my family.
But what can you do when you’re faced with change? You can’t sweep it under the carpet and take anti-depressants to mask over the inevitable… Well… You can… But you’ll still have to face it one day… In the cold bright light of un-inebriated day. So, rather than deny this growth its rightful space, like a good rambler I rode the path beneath my feet out to the horizon, leaving all hope and woe behind me.
About a year after that ‘blemish’ appeared, it had pretty much filled my every waking and dreaming moment. But rather than hindering my experience, it had become a new lens through which to view the world around me… And that’s when I realised that it wasn’t actually a ‘blemish’ at all… Rather, it was simply that “the window” had been cleaned… “The window” that led from the outside world to the inside of my Being… It had been cleaned of the dirt that had settled on it over the years of everyday human drama, delusion, fear and pain… From the distorted mode of happy fabricated endings that television can leave us in… It was nothing more than the paint of that fantasy fading and pealing off in the dry, warm heat of reality’s Sun.
So here I am, offering it back up to those of you who might not have seen it before. It’s nothing really special… But it certainly gets a mention here… Mainly as it was the first part of the puzzle that ultimately brought the idea of this website into being… Cheers Richard!
To read more about “Waking Life”, please click here.
OR to read more about Richard Linklater, the director of the film, please click here.
