I Pulled A Walter Mitty

I pulled a Walter Mitty to calibrate myself the other day, because uhm, well life’s been icky. It has been productive, but things weren’t working right, and I couldn’t figure out what wasn’t working. I thought the problem was the mundanity of daily routine, but I enjoyed what I was doing. My days are never the same, so I am actually trying to have a routine going on. Then, I thought it came out of the lack of time I had for myself. But I also had plenty of those. Then it occurred to me that I hardly have the time to be in the present for myself. My mind wonders to what I want to do next, or who I need to meet after. I’d skipped to answer the “now what” of life, before I could even take the time to identify the “what”, if that makes sense.

Mitty’s one of my favourite movies with its beautiful Greenland, wandering roads of Iceland, its scenes’ cool layouts, and the songs — oh how smitten I was with Of Monsters and Men and Major Tom. I used to watch this movie as an ode to get out of your comfort zone and try new things. And it’s a good movie to go to when you need the reminding of wandering to new places, finding one’s self in the lost, and living.

And it was the living part that made me cry this time. The narrative of deconstructing-reconstructing familiar things, how it pushed him to foreign lands and new experiences, in understanding the ‘quintessence of life’ (pun intended). I was struck with how Mitty zoned out a lot from his present because nothing was noteworthy. Mom and her piano, the office and its motto, the Sean and the wallet, they’re all too familiar. Sean’s adventure was more exciting and jumping to the burnt apartment was cooler.  I wonder if that was a lot of our problems: zoning out of our presents and missing out all the details that we’re supposed to – or even have already had. Perhaps it’s inevitable because the road we take is the same one everyday, so we often just pass it and don’t take our time to walk through it.

I guess I was reminded that new things don’t just happen when we go out to new places. We just see more of it because we pay more attention to the details of new places. But it’s here and everywhere when we allow ourselves to.

I still agree that being out of your comfort zone helps you to grow. So, yes, the winding road in Iceland was necessary; the bar in Nuuk was necessary; the plunging from the helicopter to the wrong side of the boat into the freezing ocean was necessary. Travels, new things, and whatnots give us new territory to explore and experiment.

But I also think that sometimes we’re already where we’re supposed to be — we’re the person that we’re meant to be, doing what we’re supposed to do. We just haven’t given time for ourself to be there; in that present. We’re trained to dream and envisioned our future, to live with passion (and what an overused word that is); to explore the unknown and think of the known as boring. But we often forgot that in the known, in the familiarity, in the repetition, we are refined and perfected, extended for a new level of ourselves.

It’s easier to walk away to new places. But staying and finding newness in the known, that’s a whole different game. It’s hard. It requires more creativity to break the common practice. It requires more openness, more observation, more listening, more humility to the things we’ve heard, seen, and known.

“To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel,” is not about the ‘where’, it’s about ‘how’ you choose to approach the purpose of life.