It’s Alright, I Am A Jerk

Don’t drive angry.

And don’t drive ignorant.

That’s the lesson of the Bill Murray movie, eponymous to the name of yesterday’s Punxsutawney festivities. The movie is now 20 years old, and still has an 8.1 ranking at IMDB from nearly a quarter million users. Watching the movie is a ritual now, like “Elf” or “A Christmas Story” at Christmas, and I daresay as many watched the movie as were in the Pennsylvania town watching the groundhog. And I was one.

I’ve written on it here in 2009 and revised in 2011, so not a lot more to say. But something I read online this morning brought a central idea of the movie back to mind, and then to blog. Here’s what I read —

You have made some mistakes. You may not be where you thought you would
be, or even where you want to be, but that has nothing to do with your future.

To put it as lightly as possible, this is false. Also wrong. And harmful.

I get how  it’s about encouraging, about how no matter what you’ve done, it can be overcome. You can change. In that kind of situation, the sheer (apparent) hopelessness itself can work against the desire and any effort to act. In it’s lowest application, it can simply be used as an excuse for not acting.

Here though, the aphoristic encouragement crosses the line. It works against its avowed goal — because it won’t encourage one who, not long after taking the advice, finds his past matters a great deal. Which is everyone.

Our pasts don’t preclude progress.
They don’t make change impossible.
Won’t have final say on whether or not.

But what we’ve done matters. Our “past” is our life, everything up to just a second ago. It’s all things, and in this context, mainly the bad stuff: the habits we’ve formed, the lies we’ve told, the people we’ve hurt.

Realizing we’re wrong, and saying so, clears the slate; it doesn’t remove the effects. It’s a start. A Start. Not a finish, save in the sense of saying I’m done with all that. But alcoholic women and angry men still have to “make amends,” as some traditions say.

They still have to do something.

Even if that something turns out to be a kind of nothing, as other traditions say.

When we tell people their pasts won’t affect efforts to change in the future, and they learn it’s not true — that habits must be reformed, that truths must triumph, that people won’t (yet?) trust them — they’ll be more discouraged than ever. Or we’ll blame others for not playing, creating a whole ‘nother pile of rotten for the one we think we’ve fled.

We may find a way — as Phil Connors does in “Groundhog Day” — for our past to stop defining our future. Then again, we may not.

It took him years of repeating the same day over and over to change.

We won’t get there by pretending our pasts don’t exist.

 

This is the title essay of the collection found here.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent

Can We Tawk?

Comedienne Joan Rivers’ catchphrase was, ‘Can we talk?’ with all that that entails — its rhetorical nature, the Jewish thing, an implication that at least one of the parties will be better off for having done so … Like God. T’other day a priest spoke of ontological remembrance, the immediate and ongoing memory of past-present-future

Read More »

Hide and See

Something lost, Dallas Willard said once, might yet be very valuable. One’s car keys for instance. He was speaking somewhat in the context of salvation, if I recall … the general point was calling something lost doesn’t mean it’s not wanted — quite the opposite. Yet it remains … until finding its way out or being found

Read More »

Greater Love Blah Blah Blah

Do we doubt locals thanked them for their service? I’m not equating the two. They were wrong; glad we crushed them. Only noting it’s likely they thought as much about such things as we do, which is to say not much. German citizens who believed their leaders, loved their country, watched their sons get on

Read More »

Dark Eyed Life

According to @CitizenScreen, doing yeoman’s* work daily on Twitter* relative to the Golden Age of film, today is the birth date of Mabel Normand, Hedy Lamarr, and Dorothy Dandridge — Normand: New York, 1892 Lamarr: Vienna, 1914 Dandridge: Cleveland, 1922 — which makes for coupla at least interesting, if not compelling or fascinating at the

Read More »

Random

Drudge Report

Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren’t. It would be odd if she

Read More »

I’ve Said Too Much

There’s a danger of saying too much. There’s always that. I wrote previously and succinctly about stories. Here’s a longer exploration I’ve been working on, off and on, for about a year. * Every true story starts with realizing something is out of place and involves people asking who they are in a world where things (they now see)

Read More »

Lapsed Pray-er

When I pray in the morning I often lapse into The Jesus Prayer. The link notes the Eastern Orthodox connection and its basic form — Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. — though it seems actually to come in different shapes and colors, some slightly longer and more formal,

Read More »

Get Out Of The Boat

For Jonah, dissent was a felix culpa, a happy fault that brought him closer to God. Or like Dante, when doubting pleased him no less than knowing (Inferno, Canto 11), for what he could learn and gain. Our error brings us closer to Him. And He knew it would do so. Then we know he

Read More »

Related

Total Recall

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one … There was a woman who claimed to talk with God — not to Him, but with Him. The tale was well-told around town, in which there was also a priest. The priest one day after Mass asked to speak with the woman and when they’d settled

Read More »

Is Not That Special?

From a review of a book on founding Britain’s Special Air Service in World War II, what was required of recruits — Courage Fitness Determination Discipline Skill Intelligence Training and another review noted, quoting the book — “Recruits tended to be unusual to the point of eccentricity … people who did not fit easily into the

Read More »

I Wish I Had Written This Post

If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line — starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King’s Highway past the appropriately named dangers, toils,

Read More »

Make No Mistake

When I played baseball in 10th grade, our coach was forever admonishing us to Give 110% — often prefaced by a forlorn C’mon fellas … [In 11th grade, the coach would line us up against the chain link fence in front of the dugout and hit baseballs at us. He said this was to train our

Read More »