Follow Your Bliss

We've been watching a lot of Will & Grace re-runs over the past year or two. Vini took to the series a while back, but when it was on in prime time, I was usually a bit past the farce of it. I was more into HBO series at the time. I just wanted more rich characters, more fascinating plot lines. I wasn't up for farce.

But alas, when you surrender occasionally you find yourself enjoying the silly stuff, especially through the eyes of someone seeing it for the first time, getting the cultural references from your home country, keying into how ground-breaking some of it was for its time. And how funny it is, for what it is.

I didn't have a ton of weighty stuff going on in my life during much of those Will & Grace years. I was sort of a step or two back from life at the time, absorbing as much content and color as I could from art and culture, so maybe that's why I craved more substance than the set-piece comic stylings of Will, Grace, Jack and Karen. But now I find myself more engrossed by my life, my real life and all its facets, so maybe the quips and diva turns have more appeal as a distraction. Or a surprising provoker.

In one memorable episode, Cher (in a blond wig) makes a funny turn as God in a dream sequence of Jack's. He is torn between his new lower management position at Barney's, and his "true path" of acting (which has never brought him much real success), and seeks her wisdom. After lots of funny banter, Cher dispatches Jack to consciousness with the admonition to "follow your bliss."

Indeed, Jack is drawn superficially in every way on that show, but there is a funny sort of moral to his cartoonery. He chooses the less financially smart, the less prestigious, the less rational path of returning to his disastrous acting career, thanks to the advice of his hallucination, which is really just a voice inside him telling him to choose to be happy. (Which means being self-obsessed, of course, but no matter.)

Vini and I saw Julie & Julia last night at the Mostra Internacional de Cinema, and if there is ever a story about following your bliss it's that film. Watching Meryl Streep bring the unbridled hugeness of Julia Child's joy to life, and Amy Adams' touching window into the soul of every nervous, intelligent 30 year-old, was all sheer heaven. But it also brought a lot of reality home to me. (And it reminded me of Avenue Q, a musical that has now arrived in São Paulo as a wonderfully faithful Brazilian adaptation of the Broadway original. Vini and I have seen both productions many, many times and it just becomes more meaningful with each visit.)

It seems that we rocket out of our college years with a false sense of how life is structured, and what our purpose in life must be, only to be devastated when we meet the real world outside in all its complexities, its vagueness, its moral neutrality and its seductive yet frightening ambiguity. This seems to have been the case for many generations of enlightened, educated men and women. They were told about certain roles that were fixed, and then they inevitably found out it was all a sham or another. Or they trotted out along a path that naively seemed absolutely certain, only to find that there is no such thing for a life as long as we end up having.

And then the anxiety sets in. And the depression. The lows, as it were. (This was Amy Adams' Julie, the fervent but lost soul, seeking her own path to joyous living out of the pit of a depressing job and an uncertain future.)

We frantically scramble for a high, or if one crosses our path we latch onto it with both hands and try to ride it out like a runaway truck, just to pull away from those lows, maybe banish them altogether magically. We come to depend on those highs until they begin to run our lives, command us in many ways. Make us even turn away from the most important things we cherished, the values we held so proudly, the people who love us the most. The people we once were. When we look in the mirror, it shows.

And before we know it, we're living a rollercoaster life of highs and lows that becomes so exhausting that every sort of heartbreak seems to follow us everywhere. Nothing lasts. Nothing can soothe the mind or the body. And we so want to go back to that naively structured world of college (or Washington) because it seemed far more stable, more normal, more ordered. (That's Avenue Q, and life in general in the past year.)

And then, one day, you wake up. Something sort of completes, or snaps.

For Amy Adams' Julie, it was the end of her project, to make all of Julia Child's recipes in one year and blog about it. For many of the characters in Avenue Q, it was about helping others, loving others, and accepting ourselves and the fact that life is only for now and is meant to be lived. For most of us it is something that just sort of runs its course and reaches a conclusion. An epiphany. Something that just wakes us up to reality and shows us that life is not meant to be some enervating typhoon of unnecessary drama and self-indulgence. That it need not be anchored to a false set of rules, nor be needlessly blown apart and set in broken pieces onto the water.

Life just is what it is. And we're best to accept it, learn its natural rhythms. We're smarter to leave aside the manic highs of indulging all our fantasies and appetites without limits, at the expense of real joy, real satisfaction. Real love. Real, lasting rewards. And we are happier being our real selves, rather than trying on a million different other selves which only serves to prolong our misery.

This is when we finally debut, I think. This is when the good stuff starts to happen for us, when great ideas are allowed to flower and be nourished. When our confidence is really fed and emboldened. Opportunities suddenly appear. So do people. New love can blossom and grow wild and resilient. Old regrets can be released, old debts forgiven. Bad habits finally put in their place. Childish things left in boxes. It is this time when we suddenly become our most beautiful, when our bodies seem to fall into place and we take our real shape. When our faces begin to glow, and our smiles seem borne of a deep satisfaction we didn't know before. Our eyes begin to move more fluidly, and linger meaningfully, and our touch is more heavy with feeling. Sex becomes less about emotional release, and more about emotional joining -- less fantasy and more a celebration of reality.

And you know what I think the best part of this is? It happens again. And again. And again as we go on in life. Each time it happens (25...30....35...40?) it's both more gentle and more unexpected. (We get arrogant each time, thinking "this time I found myself for real", and each time we're humbled into seeing it's a never-ending process that just gets more wonderful with time.)

I mean -- Julia Child liked to eat. Then she decided to cook. She studied. She practiced incessantly, cooking as well as eating and always perfecting, simply for the joy it gave her to eat that perfection. Then she taught cooking. Then she edited the writing of others about it. Then she wrote about it. And then she ended up on television. It was no straight line, and every step was a totally looney idea at first. But that was her extraordinary, wandering path to joy, which began when she opened herself to all its possibilities and embraced life for what it really should be.

It was a journey that Julie was just beginning.

It is one I have been on for a long, long time. And it's one you should be on if you're not on it yet.

So Now Then...

The answer is clear to me now. Clear enough for me to articulate it here. And I guess this is not so much a coda to my what-now-then. It's more a coda to this post.

I was finishing up some work this morning when my friend Cadu sent me a link to this new song about to be released by Susan Boyle. It was something I would have usually ignored (I'm a fan of hers but have hidden her updates on Facebook), and found sort of corny. But when I realized what song she was covering - a song I'd never heard sung as a ballad before -- I was struck dumb for a moment.

Nothing better described the turning point that came in my heart in the last six weeks, and what animates me today to get up every day as a new man, with a new life. And a renewed relationship with the love of my life. God bless this woman, if for no other reason than for the emotional surprise her voice brings to me, and for speaking what I need not write here to say everything I felt on the day everything turned, and led to today and tomorrow.

Love can't prevent all the pain of life, indeed. Nor can it prevent pain between those who love each other. But sometimes, in that very rare case in a man's life, love can be so strong, and people can be so resilient, that no matter how wild and strong the horses, they simply cannot drag you away.

Viradas...

Paris is eternal. Indestructible.

It's beautiful, even when it's cold and wet. It's joyous when it's sunny and warm. It shines and sparkles at night, and it holds so much history, so many wonderful stories. And not a few painful memories, which it would rather just forget.

It wakes up every morning and has a beauty and glow to it that is entirely its own. And it draws so many people in, so many dreamers who gaze at it and wonder to themselves: "can I ever have this? Could I ever be part of this?"

It has so many parts, so many neighborhoods and small alleys. So many secrets. So many indiscretions. It is at once delicious and slightly unreachable. It is pretentious and childish, but old and wise.

It is a lot like love.

Resilience Revisted

I just made what I thought was a mistake at first, by watching Magnolia again. It was a whim; I wanted to simply watch the "what now then" scene again. But from the very start, I was sucked in like a moth into a jet engine.

And the journey was not what I had expected.

It was like watching a History Channel documentary of pain rather than one of fresh, stinging wounds. I was not moved at all like I usually was in the past. (I'll confess, in fact, to a secret single behavior from the spring and summer of 2001: I used to watch selected 10 or 15 minute bits of this film in the morning before going to work in order to cry and feel a sense of release before I would face my every stoney and demanding day.) It basically confirmed my earlier suspicion that so much of what this film represents is more than a decade behind me, even if I am seeing it pop up in other people's lives today.

However, I wasn't entirely spared.

The final frame of the film still got me. It hit me right in the chest. It wasn't pain - it was resilience.

Where do I get all this hope inside me? Where do I get this indestructible optimism that can even glimmer dimly through the darkest moments? It powers almost everything strong inside me and always has. It has delivered me every time, when I've been able to deliver myself.
How can I, even at this very, very late moment, still love???

I guess it is the exasperation of knowing this is another unanswerable question, and the joy of knowing it's true anyway, that brings the rush of emotion that I can't control.

How can life be what you want it to be?

Been listening to the "Celebration" album, which downloaded onto my iPhone last night.

Forgot what a brilliant song this was, and what an exquisite video she made. She was 40 years old.