When the Tennessee Williams Festival was happening, it felt so good to be reimmersed once again in literature – oh yeah, remember that old chestnut. A long time ago when I was figuring out my life I figured it would revolve around literature and art and whatnot, instead somewhere about 16 years ago, I started working in the financial industry where well read authors were those who wrote books called Blink, The 7 Habit of Highly Effective People, and Get Rich Click! and some of my colleagues hung photographs of Ronald Reagan by their desks.
Yesterday, we had a night out and went to see Woody Allen’s new movie, Midnight in Paris, and just for a moment we were treated to the dreamlike quality of Paris in the same bulletproof way Allen has of capturing the dreamlike quality of New York – it makes you want to be there and no where else. The movie was so delightful that we both left in a good mood and happily took ourselves out for sushi.
The phases of the moon go from new to full, and the phases of an adult go from idealistic to realistic to holistic. The idealistic stage is when everything is in your own brain (of course that’s because its all you know) and then you become realistic because there are bills to pay, work to be done, a world to explore, and then later, you become holistic because you realize that everything in the world is inextricably intertwined with everything else so that a lesson learned today might manifest itself in a deed done tomorrow and that once you have gotten your head out of the clouds and grounded your feet on the floor then you start to notice that there are a lot of people around you who are looking to you to do something.
At the start of the journey you are like a sponge absorbing everything and then you reach plateaus, and suddenly you find all of the input has not disappeared into the ether, it actually gets reawakened, rekindled and repurposed into something else. Such an amazing thing this crazy life. And what would it be without fancy and imagination as Woody Allen so graciously reminds us in this dream he shared with us.