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20 jun 06 "How do you know if you have 'made a huge mistake' of your life (like the character played by Emma Thompson in 'The Remains of the Day' says)?" if you decide to feel this way, i suppose. this is turning out to be one of the hardest questions i've received, and i've been working on it, deleting chunks of it, rewriting it, etc, for something like three days now. i'm still pretty sure the answer is unsatisfactory, but at least there's a decent amount of ASCII present in 0000015.html (i can answer up to 9,999,999 questions now, instead of just 9,999). what'd emma thompson's character ("miss kenton", a housekeeper) do again? oh yeah. she and anthony hopkins's character ("mr. stevens", a butler) never made a proactive effort to get together, as it were (get married/have sex). she was, i suppose, too timid, and besides, women don't generally court men, especially not in 1930s england. as far as i understand, mr. stevens was just too uptight, reserved, stifled and repressed to approach her -- it was he who made the more grievous mistake (even though his possesion of these qualities was hardly his fault). come to think of it, i believe it was mr. stevens who mentioned the "huge mistake" in a letter, which was read in voice-over at the beginning of the movie. see, miss kenton was sending all of the signals, and mr. stevens just didn't deliver the goods. then, after years passed, mr. stevens writes his letter, and the two meet one last time. tragically, the timidity and repression continue right up until and through that final farewell, and no final exchange is made -- stevens keeps his emotional armor erected until the end, while we see a weeping miss kenton ride away in a trolley car (or double-decker bus, or something else brittish). then there's all this stuff about nazi sympathizers and so on, but it's not really relevant to this question. how do you know if you have made a huge mistake of your life, ie, ruined every successive moment in your life after and because of some single, willful act? i'm not sure; if your life sucks? just kidding. i don't think it's possible to have "made a huge mistake of your life" -- to have ruined your life -- with one act. there are mistakes with consequences, but once realized, they can be solved, or if unsolvable, must be ignored. it's sort of like that tired old aphorism, embroidered and framed on countless middle-american walls: i vow to manifest the strength to change the things i can, the courage accept the things i cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference. notice that i avoided mention of god granting you anything. remember what "rush" says: You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. realizing, or at least fooling yourself into thinking, that you have the power to change or fix things, including your own behavior and huge mistakes, is empowering. not that i do it -- i tend to wallow in cynical determinism. but, for the rest of you happy, energetic weirdos, the temple of free will is a good place to hang out. it was obvious to mr. stevens, though, that he'd made a huge mistake in his life -- if he were asked by someone, "if you had to pick the biggest mistake of your life, what would it be?", he would know. maybe it did ruin his life, or at least contributed significantly to its poor quality. if he married the wrong woman, and missed his opportunity to marry the right one, then this comes about as close to "making a mistake of his life" as possible -- his life is horribly changed because of a single, willful (sort of) act: failing to act. my problem is that i attribute very little to my own free will, but instead to external circumstances. almost anyone will tell you that this is a big problem -- ie, not taking responsibility. but on the other hand, there's the problem of taking too much responsibilty: suspecting that you've made some decision in the past that has single-handedly made life horrible. this is extremely unlikely. perhaps there are poor judgements that have had some large-ish repercussions, like marrying the wrong person, for instance. it's also irrational to discount external circumstances, as many (i believe especially in the "me"-oriented western societies) do. the single, willful act that ruins your life is, now that i think of it, pretty much restricted to romantic activity. something similar might be choosing the wrong career, getting a vascectomy, dumping money into the stock market before a crash, etc. if there were a huge mistake, sometime in the past, something that stands out for you, then the question to ask yourself would be "can if fix it?" if not, then the sane reaction is "i will accept it." but if something happened in the past and it's not fixable, then it's really hard to not look back with some regret, even dwell on it obsessively, and just sort of give up in all endeavors. but (i keep running around in circles here), even if you are able to fix the mistake, whether or not you choose to do so, or are unable to, whether you choose to accept it or not: how do you come to realize the mistake in question was severe enough to be life-changing? follow a logical course of events, i suppose, even though this can be difficult. if the problem is that you have no arms, and you think back and realize that you stuck them in a grain thresher 10 years ago, then that's probably the huge mistake. but, as i said, the path isn't usually that clear. furthermore, life situations are never solely attributable to one bad decision, and rarely even largely attributable. if i had to select a huge mistake for myself, one that's largely responsible for some overwhelming or omnipresent problem in my life, i guess i'd go with "being born." haha, no. really, my first instinct is "crossing U street in washington that one night in 1997," which lead to being creamed by that nissan maxima and subsequent brain damage. but it wasn't really a willful act -- people cross streets all the time. it's not sometihng a sane person woudl regret, as in "crossing the street was a stupid thing to do." it was, if you will, an "act of god". i really can't think of any honestly bad or stupid decisions i've made that lead to later or present catastrophe. my final answer is: you can't, and even if you could, it wouldn't help anyone. |
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