Signs

“People break down into two groups when the experience something lucky. Group number one sees it as more than luck, more than coincidence. They see it as a sign, evidence, that there is someone up there, watching out for them. Group number two sees it as just pure luck: Just a happy turn of chance. I'm sure the people in Group number two are looking at those fourteen lights in very suspicious way. For them, the situation isn't fifty-fifty. Could be bad, could be good. But deep down, they feel that whatever happens, they're on their own. And that fills them with fear.”
—Mel Gibson’s character Father Graham Hess from the movie “Signs”

Sometimes things happen which are particularly poignant to the current events in our lives. After having not seen it for many years it was a welcome contribution to the wisdom which helped reveal thoughts and feelings that I was having about some things in particular.

Which group are you in? For the longest time I’ve been in “there-is-no-such-thing-as-coincidence” group, but sometimes there are series of events in a person’s life, patterns, that offer a person the opportunity to change their mind. What if a person’s life lacks those things to give her confidence, to give him faith? What if there is no reason to have these things? When the absence of anything meaningful in a person’s life leaves them as an empty shell of their former selves, what is there to be, what is there to do, what is there to strive to?

About 15 years ago I started my foray into journaling, analyzing my thoughts and feelings against the benchmark of everything happening around me. In that turbulent world, this activity brought me solace. In these years with the advent of the technologies that allow information to be a ubiquitous feature in anyone’s life that desires it I am able to pass on those things which I have learned over the years: Philosophies that I have thought about at great lengths, pearls of truth which have been presented to me, everything forged in the fire of the meandering path of my own life across half the world and to meet many thousands of people.

“Some people are probably thinking that this is the end of the world,” Remarks the younger Merrill Hess.

“That’s true.” The older Graham Hess replies.

“Do you think it could be?”

“Yes”

“How could you say that?” Merrill is visibly taken aback.

“That wasn’t the answer that you wanted?”

Losing your faith is the quickest road to cynicism. In the above exchange, M Night Shyamahan accurately portrays the man, whose job it once was to be the most faithful, losing his faith: All that he is, that which once defined him. The death of his wife shattered this paradigm making him lose the balance between faith and reason. There are multiple paragraphs here that can be applied dealing with the process of loss or change through the stages of grieving, but that is not the scope of this entry. He tries to comfort Merrill by stating the quote with which this blog entry began. At the end of the greater exchange:

“I’m a miracle man. Those lights are a miracle,” Merrill mentioned.

“There you go.” Graham replies.

“Which type are you?” The younger Hess asks his older brother.

“Do you feel comforted?”

After a brief moment of process and analysis, “yeah, I do.”

“Then what does it matter?” Graham finishes.

Although the underlying character of the man—the honor and the staunch values to which he holds—he had no faith but still saw to it that he could offer comfort when he had nothing to offer.

Loss can do seemingly crazy things to a person, those things that in the mind of this person are not crazy: They are just par for the course.

People are the way that people are: Those things which I discuss in greater detail in the broader scope of this blog, largely because it is what interests me.

Instead of allowing humanity to degrade into a large group of self-centered narcissistic buffoons, go out and prove the greater trend wrong today.