Boyhood

So, I just saw the movie named in the title of this entry. It's famous for being filmed over the course of a dozen years about this boy, the main character Mason, and his family. It was a good cast, Patricia Arquette plays the mom, Ethan Hawke the semi-estranged dad and a few others including the guy who played Mason.

Now, at first glance nothing about this family life is similar to mine, other than the fact that I had a sister and my mom raised us and dad was around. That wasn't what touched me about the film, it was the kid himself. He was contemplative, quiet, and totally lived in his head but was an artist. This is me when I was young, his art was photography, mine was drawing, but you get the picture.

So he mentions at one point that he couldn't wait to get to that point in life where someone wasn't always nagging him to do more and to just be able to be himself and do what he wants when he wants to and live his own life. I never felt nagged, although I may have been, I lived too much in my head to notice I think lol.

The end of the movie, he's arrived at the point he wanted to be at during the rest of the movie and was at the precipice of his life and has it all to look forward to, but his mom was at a point where she thought there would be more out of life and was disappointed that there hadn't been more up to that point.

I identified with the mom a lot, because with just a flip of her consciousness she could be at the precipice of her life as well, both kids gone to college, she sold her house, moved into an apartment and could have all this amazing new stuff to look forward to. If you look at my life, and if I look at a few other lives of older yoga teachers in the area, there are at the place where there seems to be not that much more to go for but that's their choice. I could feel this way as well, but I'm about to go back to India and study yoga more with my teacher there which sends you into this deep place and brings up whole new things about yourself that you can then figure out where to go with. I could move, I could open a studio here, I could travel and teach. I've got the whole winter to figure all that out.

But my point originally was that I was feeling like the mother and hadn't thought about my life from the point of view of the son, but that was my choice, so now I'm choosing to feel like the son, like Mason.

I am at an amazing point in my life. I am 44 years old, but damn if I don't feel better mentally and physically than I did when I was in my teens and twenties. I even still feel like I just want to be at mom's house and living with not many responsibilities in life (I don't want this btw lol, just sometimes feel like that same little boy). I also don't have a lot of responsibility, no spouse or kids, no house payment. Even my possessions are easily gotten rid of (in theory). But I can go pretty much in any direction I want to go and am going to embrace the thrill of that!

So, how do you feel right now? Do you feel stuck in your life? Do you feel excited in your life? at what's to come? Do you realize that whichever way you feel is your choice? You can choose to be happier and more excited about the direction your life is going, and you can choose not to.

Which do you choose?