Formula One Zen Story Moment 🏎️🧘♂️
We have a tiny movie theater in the small town where I live, but some of the big Hollywood films get a run here. On a recent hot summer evening, thinking the theater would have air-con (not much), a small family group of us headed out to see F1 (Formula One) on the big(er) screen.
It wasn’t so much the film itself but rather the movie-going event that drew me, and doing something with family. But I’m generally game for some Tinsel Town spectacle — big name actors (Brad Pitt and Javier Bardem) and special effects (in this case racing car wildness), even if it’s a formulaic plot. And it was, for the most part.
But there were a few things I appreciated about Brad Pitt’s character in the film: as an antihero he was a reluctant master with a troubled backstory and clearly tired of fielding others’ projections, but he was working the edges of humility, loyalty, authenticity, and mentorship. Good to see all that playing out in a male heroic role. Not that it was that deep, but the script tried a little bit to peel back the stiff seams of heroic armour and look underneath. (Except for the end, in which the male hero, still incapable of true intimacy, rides off into the sunset of his own loner life more married to his skills and dreams than he could be to a living, breathing body with a heart. But this is beside the point.)
What struck me most about the movie—my zen moment, if you will—was the realization that it doesn’t much matter in which specific arena a story takes place; one character’s passions, longings, loves obsessions, and loyalties can take that character on a journey through the complexities of the human condition. It's the specifics of that one particular character in one particular situation that has the potential to transcend the specifics themselves and say something more general about life.
And though I'm now reaching beyond the specifics of the F1 plot, as a story nerd my general, personal takeaway was this:
Whatever we love and commit to fully will test our human capabilities to make sacrifices and earn the reward of wisdom and a bigger heart, if we let it. It doesn’t matter if it’s race car driving, flying jets, sailing, gardening, inventing, painting, dancing, building, or writing, pursuing our human desires and trying to fill our human needs is what makes us human and also what offers the potential to make us “better” humans. It’s not the thing itself but our human movement toward the thing that creates the magic, the life, the story.
I’m not talking about exceptional accomplishment or success at all costs—true stories, like true lives, show us what false gods those solitary ego-driven aims serve. To drag out that old cliché, "it's about the journey not the destination" might sound pat, but clichés do point to truth. In life, as in story, meaning is found “on the road” (perhaps the “road less traveled”) rather than at the starting or end points. Yet we need those points too in order to have the meaningful space in between.
So, as I walked out of a Hollywood film that was at least thirty minutes too long into a summer evening with people I love, with popcorn down my shirt a few spare licorice strands in my hand, and feeling a tad flushed, I appreciated big-screen Brad Pitt (hasn't he been a heartthrob since Thelma and Louise?...) and storytellers of all kinds.
There are way better films than F1 out there, so I’m not recommending you see it unless you want to. I’m just sharing my experience to remind you—as I was reminded— that insights arise in unexpected places, and all kinds of stories can take us where we need to go, if we let them.
"The journey of life is not paved in blacktop; it is not brightly lit, and it has no road signs."
~ M. Scott Peck ~