Even Being a Hapless Victim Doesn’t Destroy Hope
My youngest daughter turned 23 about a month ago, and decided to take me up on my offer to pick the play she wanted to see at Niagara-on-the-Lake’s annual Shaw Festival, deservedly acclaimed throughout North America. We have gone nearly every year to this idyllic and very “sweet spot” that is fortunately a comfortable day trip from home.
She picked Sweet Charity, recently and successfully revived on Broadway, which I realized I had actually never seen, although I remembered hearing about the movie in 1969 as well as the original production in 1966…and well remembered hit tunes like “Big Spender” and “If My Friends Could See Me Now”. The lead character, Charity Hope Valentine, speaking of core metaphors, is a taxi dancer in a New York dance hall who so longs for so much more – and continues to do so much to so endlessly keep herself as a hapless victim.
The Deepest Challenge to Not Getting What We Want and Try For
What I expected to be a light musical wasn’t. Beneath the songs and the Bob Fosse signature dancing and the comedy was core, ultimately unbreakable heartbreak.
We do experience wanting more and better, and how terribly it can elude us in our lives, for lots of reasons having to do with us – and lots of reasons having nothing to do with us – or even anyone else – which struck me as being pretty fundamentally scary. How cruel is the universe?
Can There Be Healing and Inspiration in “Chasing Windmills”?
How stupid are we humans, and how can we dare continue in these circumstances to “dream big”? The Director’s Notes in the program by Morris Panych said “the central character stands apart; she has a simple, if impossible, ambition, to find romantic love, in a cold and unyielding metropolis. And when one plan goes awry, as it always does, she must quickly organize an-other, never quite realizing that her quest for true happiness is futile, so long as it involves anyone other than herself (my italics). Or perhaps she does realize it and, Don Quixote-like, doesn’t give up in the face of adversity; and it is her beautiful, sad, hopeless – and perhaps even inspiring – journey that is the heartbeat of this story.”
How can that be? Are we inspiring when we behave in self-sabotaging ways that of course lead to hopelessness?
Daring Initiates Core Healing
There was a lot in the play that hit me about the power of trying no matter what based on what truly inspires us, what we dream about, what moves us to inner heights beyond who and what we are, and certainly what is even perpetually shoved in our faces as our “lot in life”. Are we unsung heroes – can there be something heroic about sustaining this?
Trying from a place of caring, daring to hope – these are truly heroic qualities that I believe do support and initiate core healing responses. I realized through experiencing the power of the message in this play that helplessness does not truly equate with hopelessness, which can truly set us free.
A Guided Meditation for Transformation
Can you think of a situation – crisis in your life – when you felt hopeless and condemned indefinitely to a situation you didn’t like and couldn’t transcend beyond, in which you somehow continued (or kept coming back to) to feel hopeful? I invite you to settle back into a comfortable, aligned position, close your eyes, deepen your breath, and imagine you can go into your core and view how that all unfolded as if it were a movie.
When the “movie” is done, open your eyes and record/diagram this story. Then take some time and read through all you’ve written, recording any additional insights that may occur.
Breakthrough Journaling… And to Follow…How to Change Your Life
Consider the power of hope in your story…and then consider how hope could link to healing. Once more record your insights.
How can you apply any/all of this to where you are and how you’re doing today? How can you apply any/all of this – and we’re talking about soul learning here – to your dreams – visions – for a better future?
Originally creative problem-solving can be pivotally unleashed through this exercise, that I’ve greatly enjoyed over this past month playing around with myself and offering to clients, with magical results for self-healing, transformation – and becoming concrete successes. Transcendence is an interesting leap that contains surprisingly necessary elements in order to become the “winning recipe”, including helplessness and hope.