Uncertainty Soundtrack To Our Lives
A middle-aged man walked through a meadow with a young boy. The clouds break, and sunlight, a visible blessing, streams down on the pair. The music, achingly beautiful, crescendos. The meaning in the moment is sweet and clear. And then, the movie ends.
A woman decides to give up trying to have a baby. A couple downsizes from their showcase home to farm and orchard. The middle child leaves for college. The youngest child turns 6. Turning points for all. But each will have to live into the meaning of the moments in their lives. In real life there is no sound track.
The most orchestrated events of our lives graduations, weddings, and funerals all rely on musical accompaniment. The music provides a moments of emotional release and reconciliation. But most of life is lived in the relative quiet between “Pomp and Circumstance” and “Amazing Grace.” We hum to ourselves and whistle in the dark.
“I wish I knew for sure that this is the right thing to do.”
A friend wonders if her decision to take a job in Seattle is the best choice. She has made her list of pros and cons, and on paper, at least, the choice seems clear. Moving is the best option.
Her reasons for staying all hinge on a sense of false security. Her reasons for leaving all speak to her bravest and best self. Still, she longs for certainty, a divining rod to point the way. She’s listening for a sound track.
Blame it on Hollywood. Who could watch Gene Kelly dance rain into liquid stars and doubt his joy? Who could bear the plaintive theme of “Platoon” and not feel the soldier’s grief? Who can look at Ingrid Bergman’s tear-stained face and not recall the losses as time goes by?
Waiting for musical cues comes easier to some than others. Growing up Catholic, I was raised to respect the hierarchy of the divine in this descending order: God, doctors, my mother, Hollywood musicals and Bing Crosby. That is, Bing Crosby as Father O’Malley in “Going My Way,” and its sequel “The Bells of Saint Mary’s.”
The good father had it all: unassuming, but amiable good looks; an ability to coax money from a rock; a chaste, but charming flirtation with the nun-as-babe, Ingrid Bergman; and a voice custom-made for lullabies. I thought it entirely possible that the world could be saved by a crooner in a clerical collar. All he had to do was sing.
Growing up, a very long line of priests came through our door. All of them were tone-deaf. Still, I offered a pitch pipe and a prayer that somewhere out there was a sound track with my name on it. I’m still waiting and still watching movies.
The man and the boy in the meadow are characters from the movie, “Shadowlands.” It’s the story of British writer C.S. Lewis and his late-blooming and life-changing love affair with the American poet, Joy Gresham. The meadow scene at the movie’s end comes after Gresham has died and Lewis, a previously avowed loner, is left with Gresham’s young son to raise.
We live, the dramatized Lewis asserts, in the shadowlands. The sun is always shining over the brow of the next hill; clarity is just beyond our reach. And true to that assertion, it took a director working years after the real Lewis’ death to film the sun pouring down on the two unlikely companions. That they felt its warmth in their lifetimes is certain. But in the shadowlands of this life they walked without a metaphor or a sound track. So do we all.
The really important events in life are mute passages. The biopsy results come back, the baby discovers her fingers, the U-Haul is finally packed. The only notes we hear are our own hearts pounding, sounding an opening, a closing or a breaking. It’s the closest thing to a sound track we’ll ever get. This pounding - scary, exhilarating and familiar - is the music of life.
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Kathleen Corkery Spencer The Spokesman-Review