THERE’S A LOT OF SOUL SICKNESS ABOUT. People go about their lives without fixing the messes that come about during the process of living their lives. And Michael Douglas’s role as D-Fens in Falling Down (1993) epitomises this soul sickness, albeit manifested by mental illness.
How much mental illness is due a rank lack of love; otherwise rampant neglect or abuse? Why is it also that people are often manacled to a past so unreal?
“And everything will be just like it was before.”
~D-Fens in Falling Down.
How many people cannot deal with the way life has changed?—totally abhorrent they are to a present reality that has gone pear-shaped.
We were never meant to deny our personally, interpersonally and divinely shaped realities. We were always designed in such a way as to cope with the “incoming” hurts as they occur.
The fact is life will fall down for us at some stage. There’s almost nothing surer.
So, the most important skill any of us can learn and hence be aware of is the skill of response. That is, we’re faced with all sorts of adverse and horrible life circumstances, from the garden-variety inconvenience to major loss, and we must choose then to respond accordingly so that the hurts of life do not take hold of us—sweeping us off course. We daren’t become mentally, emotionally or spiritually marooned!
D-fens had reached his point of ‘no return.’ Using the analogy of the ill-fated but miraculous Apollo 13 flight, what he started he had to finish—and it was always going to finish horribly.
Life is never meant to push us firmly into a corner, but it’s up to us to respond wisely and appropriately as we venture through life. As your life falls down know how to pick it up; know how to receive the love that’s all around us; an ever-present love.
Let that love soothe you.
© 2010 S. J. Wickham.
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