#not rotting away in an unchanging state. unchanged by joy or mundanity or by adversity. that is not living | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

novadreii · 3 months ago

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rewatched arrival for the hundredth time. this movie never fails to gut punch me with its approach to determinism. louise embracing her future that she knows every moment of, despite the tremendous loss and pain it contains, with open arms. she doesn't hesitate, or ruminate on how she can try and change it. she accepts it all, the good and the bad, because what she gains is worth it, so many times over for her. she steels herself against a certain future and runs forward to meet it all, to love, learn, and lose, and trusts and leans on herself to live through it all. because that's what life is; it's the joy and the suffering. to try and isolate the joy alone is madness, futility in its purest definition.

comparing her line of thinking to a palindrome (how she named her daughter, hannah), the movie kept emphasizing, "it's the same backwards as it is forwards." it doesn't matter if you can see the end; life is the same whether you live it "forwards" (without knowledge of the future) or "backwards" (with foresight). it doesn't change the significance of your life experiences; to try and avoid certain future pain just because you have the knowledge of it is a zero sum game. you think you win because you avoided pain, but you also avoided the joy that preceded it. the metamorphosis. so you still lose if you try to win, and vice-versa.

all you can do is rush forward and take it all head-on. see this whole beautiful mess as your one most precious gift; this one life, this one chance, a laughably miniature blip on the colossus that is linear time, to experience all there is to feel before you return back to an eternity without perception. it's all worth it, because only in living a full-fledged life open to everything it has to offer does the experience of living turn out to be greater than the sum of its parts; it's in trying to beat the system (avoid pain) that we actually lose.

"if you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?"

"maybe i'd say what i feel more often. i...i don't know."

#arrival 2016 #pleaaaaase this movie has a chokehold on me #the perfect sci-fi imo is one that blends the scientific and the emotional realms seamlessly and wow does this do that #this particular movie speaks so personally to me #because i lived so much of my life in stagnation trying to avoid pain i could see on the horizon #a couple of years ago when beginning my last relationship i could see the end as early as 3 months in #you know when you just realize early on there are cracks in the relationship foundation that are not repairable and will only get stressed #the more you build on top of it? yeah #it terrified me like you couldn't believe and i spent so much time in denial and fighting against it #fighting against this future i was intuitively certain would materialize #i watched this movie around that time and decided to just go for it #to not let my intuition rob me of joy in the present #as someone who lived so prudently and always tried to make the “right” choice this was monumental for me and so out of character #for a while i wished i'd just listened to my instincts about how this person would ultimately hurt me so i could avoid the suffering #because i really did have foresight everything i was scared would happen did happen almost to the letter #and i wondered does that make me stupid?#that i marched forward anyway? i didn't have the degree of certainty louise did so i thought i could change things #if i loved hard enough if i was patient enough if i did what i knew in my heart to be the right thing #but it changed nothing #but no i wasn't stupid and i would do it again #because it was still a beautiful experience at its best and it taught me valuable lessons at its worst #i have undoubtedly changed as a person i will never be the same again and THAT is living #not rotting away in an unchanging state. unchanged by joy or mundanity or by adversity. that is not living #undoubtedly better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. i never rly agreed with that until i saw this movie #personal #favourite movies #scifi #movies #this applies to everything not just love. take that chance! do the thing that scares you. bc that's the only way to really live #regardless out of the outcome

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