The other day I was watching one of my favorite movies, Groundhog day with Bill Murray. I don’t remember how many times I have watched this movie. For those of you that haven’t. The plot is very simple: A less than perfect weather TV anchor named Phil, the character played by Mr. Murray, goes to Punxsutawney to report the weather on location during Groundhog day. Soon he finds himself stuck in this little town living the same day over and over again.
If you haven’t seen the movie (I seriously doubt this but you may have been abducted by aliens for the past 17 years), I won’t spoil it for you, however I couldn’t stop thinking the movie is really a metaphor for life itself.
We humans are animals of customs; we repeat things over and over again without even stopping to think about it, we go to the same the restaurants, get together with the same people, eat the same food, … I am not talking here about the tasks we have to do, like getting a shower, once or twice a month, or going to work, disposing of our bodily byproducts, and other must-do activities. I am talking about the things we choose to do.
Even some naïve souls like me who wish their lives were a little more adventurous end up drawn to the same places and people and even thoughts. The latter are really curious. Some of them come in the form of memories that we associate with things we see, smell or feel. These triggered memories fall into the chicken and the egg category. Do we fill our lives with things that remind us of the commonplace or do we seek them out and then forget the next day.
The movie protagonist seems to feel like repeating a day over and over is excruciating and does everything in his power to stop this monotonous hell he is living into, yet we seem to even wish for our daily routine to start to feel better, more relaxed. Who hasn’t been longing for a vacation right after you came back from one?
We long for stability and, even more, we need predictability in our daily lives. In a twisted way it gives us purpose to have no purpose whatsoever, to be doing the same things out of routine.
Like our friend Phil, we soon find out that doing the same things may help us excel one day and, after endless repetitions, perform our greatest masterpiece: the perfect day.
We live our lives in the futile attempt of, maybe, reliving tomorrow a better day than yesterday, without fully enjoying the perfect today: the here and now.
