I was doing some serious channel surfing the other night when I came across the Hallmark Channel. I usually surf right on by, but I was feeling Christmasy and a Christmas movie was on (what are the odds?) so I gave it a quick minute.
Apparently there’s more than a handful of the Hallmark Faithful out there, as the network churns out roughly 800,000 new Christmas movies a year (maybe an embellishment, maybe not). The new films add to their trillions of existing ones, sure to be running on a never-ending loop until the End of Time. They’re all pretty much the same movie of course, with different actors and characters’ names on rotation. I was barely a minute into the one I was checking out (and already having viewer’s remorse) whenit hit me:
Hallmark Christmas movies are just the television equivalent of romancenovels, with some holiday cheer sprinkled in for good measure.
You’d think I would’ve remembered. Ha! It’d be great if they occasionally put out a Christmas movie that was about…oh Idk…the meaning ofChristmas or sumthin? Or hey, maybe some that are all about dogs or circus clowns or anything other than the constant deluge of Paperback Love. When did Cupid hijack Christmas anyway?
After a moment of pondering all this, I realized I was still holding the remote, and that I have access to far more channels and streaming services than a cavedude needs. A couple minutes of professional scrolling later, I hit the jackpot with the 1965 classic “A Charlie Brown Christmas” that had just started on another channel.
There’s timeless magic in this Charles Schulz gem, from the storyline (good ‘ol Charlie Brown searching for the real meaning of Christmas), to the soundtrack (the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s jazzy piano-y vibrations are good for the soul) to the throwback to simpler times.
“I never thought it was a bad little tree. It’s not bad at all really. Maybe it just needs a little love.” – Linus Van Pelt
Christmas Love has a heartbeat, and it sounds a lot like that.
I recently saw the trailer for the upcoming Will Smith movie, Emancipation, about a runaway slave in the 1800’s desperately fleeing from the plantation owners who tried to kill him. The clip was included in an article on social media announcing the film. Against my better judgement, I started reading some of the comments…
-I’ll never EVER see anything associated with Will Smith again, wish he’d do us all a favor and just disappear forever.
-This movie actually looks great. It’s a shame that Smith is the star and not someone else, because normally I’d be all over this. But nah I’m good.
-Fuck Will Smith!”
There were some positive comments mixed in but most were slamming him, many of them vulgarly.
We all have our reasons to like or dislike someone and I respect the opinion of others, but I’ve had a little different take regarding Smith since the infamous slap at the Oscars earlier this year.
It seems that overnight, most people felt the same as those quoted above. Prior to the incident, I didn’t know anyone (or hadn’t heard of anyone) who absolutely hated Will Smith. Just the opposite actually. For the longest time, he was widely considered one of the good guys in Hollywood; 0ver-the-top talented and someone who, for the most part seemed to be a good family man and kept it real. In recent years, he made many short motivational videos, encouraging people to not give up on their dreams. He was one of the biggest box office stars in the world and yet still seemed in touch with his own humanity and that of others.
I won’t delve into the relationship problems the Smith family had / has. All I’ll say is that an open marriage isn’t a marriage at all, as far as I’m concerned. The argument could be made that Smith invited the pain he was feeling, in the months leading up to that ill-fated night.
Being in pain, having a hurting soul, doesn’t justify his actions but it seems that was the backdrop Smith was coming from when he tried to smack Chris Rock’s face right off his head. There’s zero excuse for it. Comedians often say things that are considered offensive, and Smith should’ve anticipated and rolled with the moment. But he didn’t.
He lost his shit on national TV with millions of people watching.
So what’s the difference between someone like Will Smith, and you or I?
Welllll aside from our bank balance, the most obvious is that he’s a global celebrity and the cameras were rolling when he had his moment. Truth is, we’ve all lost our shit at times, multiple times. Sometimes justified and sometimes maybe not so much, but even so – hopefully we’ve learned something about ourselves each time, and hopefully it happens less frequently than when we were younger. For most of us, it probably still happens occasionally. Life’s brutal sometimes and of course, we all come from a place of our own pain too.
There’s a quote from the late Stephen Covey that seems pretty relevant –
“We judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions.”
If you think about that longer than 2 seconds, it’ll cut straight to the heart. It’s true, we’re all guilty of this. It’s ridiculously easy to judge someone for their actions, isn’t it?
How’d ya like to be forever condemned / judged by others for a single event in your life?
Disclaimer: sometimes, peoples’ actions are exactly who they are. Theydon’t try changing their behavior and they just don’t give two fucks. There are some sour apples in the world who don’t deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt. In these cases, we’d do best to just avoid them altogether.
Then there are people who genuinely try to change.
This is another one that should cut to the heart too. We’re all guilty of holding someone’s past against them, sometimes regardless of how much they’ve worked on themselves. And of course, others have done that with us.
I don’t care how anyone else feels about Will Smith. But as for myself, I get the feeling he’s been doing some serious soul-searching, has been genuinely remorseful, and has been doing the work so that he can get his personal life back on track
I’m looking forward to seeing the movie – it looks very poignant, and according to the trailer is “inspired by a true story” from a very dark time in our history.
Alrighty then! Just a day after writing about my complete lack of enthusiasm for early Christmas celebrations / decorations in my previous article “Youltide” last week, I began throwing some decorations up in the cave and did some holiday shopping online. Initially, it wasn’t so much a change of heart as it was simply something borne out of pragmatism – I was home for the extended Thanksgiving weekend anyway…why not get a jump on things rather than put it off? Decorating can take a while and the older I get, the pickier I seem to have gotten when it comes to Christmas Cave decor and placement (which is undoubtedly a good thing).
Somewhere along the way, it became less about being pragmatic and more about embracing the moment – I put on some holiday tunes and had a glass or two of Christmas cheer. I started thinking of Christmases past – from my own youth, to when my kids were little, up to the present day. It occurred to me that over the course of the last 12 years or so, since my divorce, I had kind of conditioned myself into thinking that Christmastime would forever be “less than” – it would never be the same. Never the same when having a broken family, never the same while not having the kids with me all the time due to shared custody, never quite the same as the kids grew older and ventured out on their own. Well of course, as with everything else in life, things change and they simply don’t remain the same.
Does that mean we’re condemned to having a less satisfying life as time goes on? Should we just accept having less contentment? Should we just be always looking at the past?
The obvious answer is a resounding NO, but sometimes it’s the most obvious things that somehow elude us. Sometimes we inadvertently condition our own thinking in negative patterns, and we end up condemning ourselves to a ‘less than’ life, whether it’s during the holidays or year-round. But hey – life can be hard enough on its own without getting any help from us to make it harder.
I must say, realizing that I’ve somewhat sabotaged my holidays all these years was quite the downer at first – until it became quite liberating.
I still have a bit more decorating and shopping to do, but I’m largely done with it all, which is unprecedented for me in early December. For the first time in years, I find myself embracing the Season, as opposed to just looking ahead to the day. What a concept!
I recently experienced a significant life change that impacted me a great deal. What had been one of the best parts of my entire life, something that brought joy to my heart and peace to my soul, was suddenly gone in the blink of an eye. Poof! GONE.
When something like that happens it can be incredibly unsettling. As a generally optimistic person (perhaps not including much of 2020, but I digress), I wasn’t convinced it really WAS gone. Surely this is just temporary right? How could something that had been so natural, so pure and beautiful for so long, be gone in a FLASH? I didn’t know what kind of alternate reality I was living in but I convinced myself that there was no way the Universe would ultimately let this happen.
Ya know…..sometimes the Universe has the last laugh.
After a few days of trying to wrap my head around this painful curveball, I started to get some perspective. “Perspective”….what a beauty of a word. Getting a new perspective on life’s challenges can open our ears to what the Universe is telling us, and what I heard it telling me in no uncertain terms was “Mike! Go to the coast man!” Okay it didn’t sound exactly like that and it wasn’t Morgan Freeman’s voice but I heard it. It was ON.
Oddly enough, I don’t recall ever setting out for the coast just by myself, with no plans to meet up with anyone and no agenda (you’d think I’d been living in a cave or sumthin’!). The thought of just being alone at the beach, toes in the sand and drink in hand and taking in nature’s beauty, soon became quite liberating. It was a last-minute trip and I asked a friend who lives in the area what might be a good beach that didn’t get too crowded. He said “Seacliff is always nice.” Without doing any research on my own, I took him at his word. He’s a local, surely he knows right?
It’s not that he was wrong. Seacliff State Beach in Aptos, CA is a little slice of heaven, as is Rio Del Mar, Capitola, and the entire Santa Cruz area. My initial impression after pulling into the parking lot and walking to the cliff’s edge to have a look was….holy crap it’s crowded! Who ARE these people and what are they doing on my beach? Alas, it was a beauuutiful late-September Saturday, of course there would be throngs of people. No worries, I was ready to claim my spot in paradise.
There was only one access point, a looong downward, winding slope. Carrying my chair, tote bag and cooler, it was a great workout…right up until I realized I had forgotten something in the car and had to trek back up. Ha! After getting to the bottom again and finding the perfect spot, I took a look around. The cliff runs the entire length of the beach and it’s simply stunning. Accented by the clearest blue sky that day and a tiny body of water known as the Pacific Ocean and hey…..I started to think the Universe might be onto something here.
Within a few minutes of settling in, a large group of youths, early 20’s, hunkered down on my immediate right. There were about a dozen of ’em, guys and girls, and they had a big cooler of adult beverages. Hey kids, alcohol is prohibited at the beach ya know! (which is why I brought a water bottle to pour my own beverages into). They were oblivious but good-natured and I was just glad to be in my spot. Cheers guys.
After an hour or so of just taking it all in, it was time for a stroll. I made a long loop from the rear of the beach down to the the water’s edge and just froze. The waves were breaking hard, the tide was coming in fast and the water was beautifully clear. I thought about jumping in and taking a quick swim to the horizon and back, but decided that would be best for another day. I must have stood there and gazed at everything for a good 45 minutes, just stunned at how beautiful it was, how perfect the weather was and how glad I was to be there. For the first time in weeks, I felt peace.
As the day wore on I became glad to be sitting near “the kids.” They spread out and were tossing a frisbee around, laughing, playing some tunes and just having a good ol’ time. Man, to be young like that again. Their music was old school – Zeppelin, Seger, Deep Purple. Given how young they were, I was just glad they weren’t blasting Justin Beiber or anything and told them I liked their playlist. Suddenly an errant frisbee toss was headed towards me and I made a one-handed snag, which they got a big kick out of. One of the guys later commented to the rest of them about a hotel he had recently stayed at that had a mirror on the ceiling. I couldn’t help myself: “Was there a sign that said ‘Objects are larger than they appear?’ Rauckus laughter. They asked me to take a group pic of them before they left, then as they walked off, one lad said “You’re pretty cool for an old dude. The Giants suck though!” (I was wearing one of my SF Giants hats). I said “Easy there son, those are fighting words!” They laughed as they walked off to resume the rest of their lives. Thanks for being part of my day guys, have a great life. Make good choices! 😉
My neighbors to my left then asked me to take a group pic of them as they were leaving, saying that I was now the “official beach photographer.” Hahaha my pleasure. Then it was time for another stroll, more gazing, more bewonderment. The sun started setting and the sky became an incredible fusion of orange, pink and red, while the foam on the waves took on a purple hue from the sky’s reflection as the waves came crashing ashore. Ahhhhh, a caveman could get used to this.
What was initially a last-minute trip ended up giving me much more than expected. The next time you find yourself struggling with any of life’s curveballs, I highly recommend getting away to someplace scenic and serene by yourself. It won’t necessarily provide any answers, but if you’re lucky…you just might find some peace.
