3 Things We Can Learn from a Movie

Batman Begins

I’m sure I’ve mentioned my obsession with movies before. I’ve seen so many that my brain has it’s own IMDB – but instead of it being an Internet Movie Data Base, it’s an Intermind Movie Data Base. When an actress/actor looks familiar to me, I dig through my own collection to find out JUST where I’ve seen them before. Sometimes I find the reason they look so familiar…but most of the time it comes down to, “Well, I know I’ve seen them somewhere!”

Something else I’ve found is that we can learn a lot from movies. You just have to know where to look. Since I spend a great deal of my day writing self help articles and my evening watching movies, I thought I’d give it a swing. Below are three lessons I think we can allow movies to teach us:

1. Look ahead and move on! I’m sure you’ve seen movies that leave you yelling at the character(s), “Get over it!,” “Get pass it!,” or “Move on!” Drives me straight crazy – you can see that the character has a full life ahead of him/her but they won’t turn around and face the right way. They just stand there with their back to the future, facing the past – when it should be the complete other way around.

Example: “Batman Begins” Bruce Wayne had a hideous, horrible, devastating thing happen to him when he was a child. He lost his parents to a violent crime. But he continued to carry the tragedy with him…not in his back pocket, not in his shirt pocket…he carried it with both hands up in front of him, and stared at it every second of the day. Basically, he couldn’t live because he spent so much time with death.

Are we guilty or are we guilty? If we were smack in the middle of a movie, would our viewers be yelling at us, “Get pass it! Move on!” Are we carrying a tragedy or a mistake around with us, looking at it so much that we aren’t fully living?

It might not even be a bad past that’s robbing us of our present or future. It might be what we think was a better/happier time. We might be trying to force our present and future to live up to terribly high expectations, and instead of being grateful for what we have, we’re grateful for what we had.

Again, our viewers would be fed up with us and would freely tell us to, “Get over it!”

2. Surround yourself with the right people. A Movie’s Only as Good as it’s cast, right? A lot of that holds true for life. Granted, we can’t cast our own family (and I’m not even going there) – but we can decide who we spend the rest of our lives with. We can also decide what friends we allow into our life. Each of these people should help us to live a better life in some way. They most certainly shouldn’t hinder our life or cause otherwise good days to be bad or rob us of happiness.

3. There are going to be conflicts, so expect them….face them….and be the last one standing. I’d never, ever, ever want to sit through a movie where nothing exciting happened, would you? Can you imagine? The character gets up, has his coffee, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, goes to bed. I’d feel like I’d stepped into The Dick Van Dyke Show. Nice enough place to visit, but after a while Laura’s crying would make me homicidal. She’d go, “Rooooooob…” and I’d snap somewhere between the 4th and 5th o.

Sometimes our day will be a comedy, other times a drama. Sometimes we might even get a little action and adventure. Some nights will be romantic, and some might even rank an R rating. Sadly, of course, there will be the heartbreaking tragedies – there’s absolutely no way around them. But whatever life throws our way, we have to keep moving on – if it’s bad, hope that it gets better…..if it’s good, hope it gets even better.