Between October 2017 and June 2018, I published weekly posts of three Movies with Meaning. The full list of movies over that time is featured here. Since June 2018 I have chosen to publish a post about movies only as the spirit takes me.
As I write this post today, it comes from having just received a message from a friend that inspires me to write about this movie, Life is Beautiful, or as the Italian title goes, La vita è bella.
La vita è bella
Life is beautiful. Children constantly act as a reminder to me of that.
I love art. I love music. I love architecture. I love nature. More than any of that beauty though, I am insatiably curious and always inspired by people, none more so than my three sons.
Now for an admission about the movie. I watched it nearly twenty years ago when it first came out, and have not been able to watch it since.
It is an uplifting movie about how there can be beauty even in the deepest and darkest suffering, and beauty flows from love, and in particular love for one’s child.
Why, then, that I’ve not been able to watch it since that first viewing? At that time the age of the son in the movie was about the same age as my oldest son was then. Watching the father in the movie create a virtual and beautiful world for his son in the midst of terrifying darkness was therefore so visceral for me that I have not been able to revisit it.
So, there is dark and light in the world. To experience the bright shining of the light, we must also acknowledge, and sometimes even open ourselves up to the risk of facing the dark.
This then takes me to my friend’s message. As she was present to her two very young children playing that morning, she was reminded of Kahlil Gibran’s poem on Children from his massively popular book “The Prophet”. When asked what the meaning of his book was, he summarised:
“You are far far greater than you know—and All is well.”
Every time I read any passage from The Prophet, it washes over me, acting as a reminder that there is so much beauty in the world and in people and our experiences of and with them.
ON CHILDREN
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.