SOUNDS LIKE BUDDHA

I watch old movies. I suppose it has something to do with growing old, the comfort of things familiar, knowing how it turns out. Then you get to watch your favorite actors when they were young. Last night I watched a film from 1984, The Natural. It’s a baseball story with a plot that could only happen in the movies. Baseball is the context but it’s about people and the timeless struggle between the rich, powerful and those neither rich nor powerful. The movie is about internal struggles that everyone wrestles with. Cast to be in their mid to late 30’s, Robert Redford and Glenn Close are star-crossed lovers whose lives turned unexpectedly and put them on different paths. They reconnect, he an unlikely hero on a major league baseball team and she is raising their teenage son, the one he doesn’t know about. One generation removed, Wilford Brimley is the salty, old manager, trying to coach his team to the pennant. He is cast against character actor Robert Prosky as “The Judge”, the team’s owner, setting his team up to lose, betting against them. In the end, the good guys, the little folks prevail. It’s as corny as it sounds but you love the characters and it ends well, even if it’s all make believe. 

It’s not strange for a single line in a movie to capture me, something philosophical or wise. In this case it was the hook line in a quiet, walking, talking scene.  On paper the script must have sounded melodramatic but Close and Redford took it over the top. They were walking together, trying to find the right words, the right approach to mending old fences. Each fishing a little, wanting to share just enough without tipping the scale. They don’t complain about how unfair life is and obviously it had been unfair. They arrive at a mutual understanding that life sometimes takes you where you didn’t want to go, regardless of how hard you try or how right the choice feels. At this point the star right fielder doesn’t know about his son. She has to go home and he, back to the ball park. She says, “You know, I believe we get two lives; the one we learn from and then the one we live with.”  They turn and go their own ways. Corny or not, I bought in. Maybe that’s why I’ve seen the movie so many times.  

Sometimes, I think, when the window of opportunity opens and closes, you might think you missed it and it’s all your fault. But life doesn’t give up when you fall short or miss the mark, it opens new windows, maybe even a long gone, bygone window.  My little shred of wisdom; I can’t remember the source, maybe it was me. It feels like something I would say; “Sometimes you have a life and sometimes it has you.” I’m flirting with karma. The life you learn from and the life you live with; do you have to be old for this to resinate! Is this Buddha, it sounds like Buddha: “When you fall down, get up. If you keep falling down, keep getting back up.” That’s all there is. Fall down, get back up, that's it. In all my life, it took every big and little thing just the way it happened to get me to this moment. Anything different and who knows where life would have taken me. I don’t really want to know.