Safety and Instant Gratification

Hey guys, this shouldn't just be the Laura Blog. Could someone else please post something?

So a lot happened over the past week or so. Last week I spent some time in the same theatre with Christopher Walken and Joanne Woodward, watching them work. I also got to watch all the rest of the phenomenal actors on stage with them work, and was able to observe them having a lot of fun with their craft. We had our own play reading at the intern house last Tuesday, which was great, and I hope it started a tradition. I got to meet Gene Wilder, I got to meet Bill Haber, I got to meet and talk to a bunch of interesting people, I learned a lot of new things, I had fun. But surprisingly, the thing that affected me most was the midnight showing of The Dark Knight last Thursday night.
It’s not for the reasons you think. While The Dark Knight itself was a fascinating movie, the thing that stuck with me more was the conversation Holly and I had with one of the guys sitting in front of us while we were waiting for the show to start.
He was from Boston (not that that matters for the story), and he was there with some friends and we were all chatting about this and that as we waited for the movie to begin. Somehow we started talking about movie musicals, and that lead us to RENT the movie, and why it sucked and did horribly at the box office when the stage show is so fantastic. There are several reasons for this. The one I chose to harp on was the director. You don’t get the guy who directed Home Alone to direct RENT. You get someone like Spike Lee to direct RENT. And this guy I was talking to laughed, and then that got us onto Spike Lee, and he said Spike Lee didn’t like white people. Holly made the point that he also didn’t like ignorant black people. I made the point that most of us don’t like ignorant people, period, regardless of race. That brought us to the conversation on how to reverse ignorance and bigotry. I made the comment that I have tried with several people with out success, that some people just don’t want to open their minds. He said he didn’t believe this was true. Everyone really wants to have their minds open no matter how much they fight it initially. I thought this was really interesting. Holly and I asked him to please give us an example of this. So he started talking about today’s society being so focused on instant gratification.
WALL-E (another movie that has had a profound effect on me this summer) is a movie that demonstrates our societies demand for instant gratification. We see something, we want it, we get it. Simple as that. We have come to think that if we try something a couple of times and it doesn’t work this means it’s impossible. We have forgotten the art of wearing someone down. Of persistence. Of not giving up. (Which is bad, because you can bet the religious zealots out there have not forgotten). Of digging in, staying in the trenches, and really working for something.
This made me think. Just saying that you are in a safe environment doesn’t mean that you are. Just giving lip service to something doesn’t mean it exists. Maybe we are giving lip service to something we haven’t bothered to create. And maybe we haven’t bothered to create it because we are used to instantly getting things we want. For example, I can go on i-tunes right now, click on a button, and download the song Safety Dance instantly. Then it’s mine. I own it. I can listen to is whenever I want. But does that mean I really know how to do the safety dance? No.
These things take time. It takes time and a well thought out overview of things to create a safe environment. We have to know that everything we do, every activity, every word that comes out of our mouths is in service to this thing. Jodi came in to talk to the apprentices today and it was profound and wonderful. She talked a lot about staying centered, about knowing what you are all about and staying true to that, and making sure that everything you are doing is in service to that. It’s hard. It’s time consuming, energy consuming, brain consuming. But it’s worth it. This also ties in with Debra’s whole thing about the big picture. Sure we could do a lot of really cool things, but wouldn’t it be better if we could do a lot of really cool things in service to something? In service to something larger?
None of this is to say that something like creating a safe environment isn’t owed lip service. The power of positive thinking is a truly amazing thing, and so to just keep repeating the phrase “safe environment” is a powerful thing. Maybe if we keep encouraging it we can slowly build it anyway. A sort of “if you build it, he will come” sort of philosophy.Something else that Jodi said stuck with me. Well, a lot of things Jodi said today stuck with me, but here’s the one I’m going to harp on for the moment. There are certain things that have happened around here before we were fully ready, as an institution, for them to happen. That reminded me, strangely, of the movie Under The Tuscan Sun. A man in that movie tells the story that they built train tracks over the Swiss Alps before there was a train that could make the trip. They built it because they knew one day there would be a train that could do it. One day the train would come. So maybe we’re not ready now. But maybe we built it because we knew one day we would be. Because, maybe, in building the tracks first, we preemptively lay the foundation for what we would like to become, what we would like to happen. I mean, hey, once you found out those tracks were there, there was no choice but to build a train that could fill them.
Maybe we say we are in a safe environment to send the message that we need to create one. That it is important to create one. That it is our priority to create one. And that we’re in it for the long hall. We will stay here (or outside with our parking cones) until we get a safe environment, because we’ve built the tracks. So now we have no choice but to build the train.
~ Laura (Roux)