What do you do when you are on the other side, when you have crossed the abyss? How do you feel? How do you behave? How do you react? How do you take the tentative steps to move forward?
There are times in our lives when we experience transformation, when we have faced our demons and have come out alive...times when we have painfully grown up or survived an unexpected, jarring experience.
As an avid reader and movie fanatic, I often relate my own personal experiences in life to my favorite stories on film. In fact, as I create choreography I often refer to moments in films as sources of inspiration for certain movements or feelings. Life to me, is like one giant MOVIE.
The cinematic moment that keeps coming to mind right now is a scene from one of my favorite films, Shawshank Redemption, regarding Andy Dufresne, "who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side." Like Andy standing in that river with rain pouring down on him, arms held up and stretched wide, we are awakened to a new sense of of our own being. We are free. Finally, free. Andy walked out of that river and took ownership of his life. He took control of the situation and let justice be served.
I think what is beautiful about Stephen King's writing of this character is that as long as Andy stayed in the prison, he reciprocated the criminal behavior even though he wasn't a criminal in the first place. He allowed the prison to control him. He did what he had to do to survive. Though he truthfully found meaningful relationships and understood the goodness of the people who were also trapped inside the prison, which made him regret leaving them behind, he understood that if he continued to stay he would lose himself in there.
I think there are times in our lives where we are all stuck in our own prisons. There are times where we compromise our beliefs or our boundaries in order to function in the environment we are in. Maybe it is because we desperately want to survive, or maybe it is because there is something that we desperately want to have, or some image or lifestyle that we want to be a part of. Does it mean that we create that environment? Maybe, maybe not. But by choosing to stay in it, we definitely will always feel the turmoil of our inner struggle with our own character. When Andy decided to finally leave, he faced crawling through 500 yards of sewage to reach freedom. What a metaphor.
But he did it, and he SURVIVED. As he walked away he took his integrity and his self-worth with him. I like to believe that he was a better person on the outside afterwards. That he wasn't so absorbed with the fictitious drive for money, status, and higher-class and that maybe he saw people differently. I would like to think that we all can come out of our own prisons more generous and more caring, but most importantly, with more understanding of our own self-worth.
So what do we do once we have crossed the abyss? "We get busy living, or get busy dying." Oh...and we remember "that hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies."
Or maybe we just watch Shawshank Redemption...
Andy Dufresne
