What's In Front Of Us
Image by WikiImages from Pixabay
(SPOILER ALERT: While I’m not specifically giving anything away in this post, I do reference a key quote from the movie “Ad Astra”. If you haven’t seen the movie and plan to, you might want to skip this post until then.)
Long flights are pretty much the only place I catch up on my movies, and my recent international trip was no exception, when I caught up on the Brad Pitt film, Ad Astra. (Reviews are mixed but I found it to be exceptional.)
In one of the film’s most important scenes, Pitt’s character makes an important observation about his father:
“He could only see what was not there and missed what was right in front of him.”
That statement resonated very strongly with me because it spoke to something that I think we all tend to do. We have these goals that we set out to achieve or expectations that we hold strongly - things that we believe in deeply and that, we think, define us.
It’s easy, then, to become so focused on them that we lose sight of all else. We ignore the journey for the goal. We push aside the practical lessons because we’re so focused on the pursuit of the original task. We destroy our self-confidence because we feel that only the attainment of the original, singular end-goal defines us and who we are.
And it becomes worse if there’s much that we’ve given up along that path, sacrifices that we wouldn’t have otherwise made. Because then we feel compelled to justify our decision, to ensure that it was worthwhile. We ignore others who try and counsel us and give us advice because, well, redirecting would be wrong.
So we become more and more entrenched. More and more difficult. More and more lost. Surely, this couldn’t have all been for nothing?
The reality, at least in my view, is that we all choose our journeys, and we all must set out to achieve our goals with discipline and persistence and commitment.
But we must do so in light of our circumstances and our situations. By all means, we should stick to our path and do the work that’s needed - sometimes ignoring all others - to get what we want.
But sometimes, the end goal of the original journey wasn’t meant to be ours. And that’s OK. Because it’s never all for nothing. Instead, we need to be open-minded enough to take away other, equally as important lessons from what we are doing. Lessons that teach us who we are, that shape what we believe, that determine where we will go and who we can become.
These lessons are right in front of us. They are the lessons we’re meant to have learned.
