It's a Wonderful Life

Saturday, out running errands, I saw two different cars—in two different parts of town—with two different sizes of the same bumper sticker: Life is Great.


Saturday night, It's a Wonderful Life was on television. (I don't have cable, so there aren't as many classic movies on television as there might otherwise be.) Now, IaWL is not my favorite holiday movie by a long shot. It's also not my favorite Jimmy Stewart movie. In face, I find it rather grim, and this year is only the second time I've watched it from start to finish for that reason.

If you've never seen the movie, here's the movie poster version (or not): George Bailey has found his life to be one long series of disappointments. He is selfless, yet a jerk, as he gives in to what life brings him, changing plans, giving up dreams—I don't really know what drives him: perhaps an overwhelming sense of duty? He constantly harps on wanting to leave his hometown for the big, bad world, yet every time he starts to, something gets in his way: he's heading off for college when his father dies; in order to keep the meanest man in town (who never gets his, by the way) from taking over everything and destroying peoples lives, he gives up college and stays home to run the family business. And so on. He gives his college money to his younger brother, expecting to go himself when Harry finishes and comes home to take over. Harry doesn't. Eventually WWII comes along and George, with a 4F card (deaf in one ear from saving his brother's life) stays home and keeps things going. Friends and brother are off saving the world, building industries, and living their dreams; George stays home and tries to keep it all together. And no, he's not happy about it. Really, this is not a film of touching perseverance because George, frankly, is an ass.

And on Christmas Eve, when the last straw is put on his back—mixing metaphors, here—in the form of an $8,000 deposit that goes missing (Mr. Potter, the guy who wants to run everything and destroy the Baileys in the process, ends up with it, but is he found out? Oh, no....), decides he's worth more dead than alive and in a drunken stupor goes off to kill himself. Enter an angel (Clarence) out to earn his wings. He forces George to save his life instead of ending his own (good old selfless George) and then takes him on a tour of what things would have been like if he (George) had never been born.

And there's the epiphany. George, who's tried so hard to do good, really has. And despite his general surliness, all the people who've benefited from his generosity through the years, come through for him when he needs it, too. I think he realizes there's something to building a community, not just a business. At any rate, he ends the movie much happier than he is through about 9/10s of it.

So what's the point? Without reading too much into the movie, here's a takeaway for you: our lives are a series of choices, and every choice leads us to something else. Everything that went "wrong" by virtue of George not being there involved a decision on his part: saving his brother's life as a child, understanding the pain of his employer had caused a potentially fatal mistake (and preventing it from happening), choosing to run the family business instead of going off to do his thing—every one of these actions had repercussions he did not realize. In other words, he created new realities through a series of choices, not a series of accidents. He could have saved his brother's life, but then chosen to ignore the poison pills later by paying more attention to something else. He could have insisted on going to college when it came up, instead of staying home—there was no point at which something happened accidentally, even when it felt that way.

Yes, I believe in fate—but I believe that the fate-directed intersections in our lives are rarely set in stone. Those that are, we find ourselves directed to again and again (like meeting someone for the first time, and discovering you've lived in the same six cities and maybe overlapped but never met, although you should have.) Mostly, I think the intersections—the places where choices can be made—are meant for conscious creation (free will, if you like) to set the new course. Doesn't mean we always make the "right" decisions, but they are the places where we change our, and others, lives, even if we don't realize it.

If you don't like where you are, if you realize you got here due to a conscious decision, I think that's very optimistic—because it means you have choices about where to go from here.