You say you want a Revolution

Have you seen the movie Revolutionary Road? Most.depressing.movie.ever! You've been warned. If you watch it, make sure to make an appointment with a counselor for the next day and keep your Rx. of Zoloft at hand. Here's the gist...this couple is madly in love, they get married, move to the suburbs, have kids and slowly start to die inside until they drift so far apart that...I won't give away the ending, but did I tell you it's fucking depressing? I naturally try and find the message in every movie, some nugget to take with me. For instance, yesterday I watched Confessions of a Shopaholic in which I learned that if somehow you wrack up 16k in credit card debt, all you have to do to pay it off is to get a job as a writer and get famous overnight. Credit card debt SOLVED!

So Revolutionary Road...I searched for the meaning hard! This is what I think. It's all about perspective. I don't hold fast to any real belief system. I think beliefs keep your mind stuck and unable to see life for what it really is. I do however really believe one thing very strongly, we create our reality, good or bad, we are the architects of our life. I believe that through to my core. In the movie they decided they were sinking further and further into depression and they needed to shake things up. They decided they would follow their dreams and move to France-totally change their lives. Overnight it seemed they were transformed into a different couple. They were happy, optimistic, having sex again on the kitchen counter, essentially back to their old selves. But what had changed about their reality? Nothing! They still lived in the same house, in the same soul sucking suburban neighborhood, same jobs etc...yet they were again alive. Why? Their perspective changed. They way they saw life was totally altered, they altered it, which in tern made them live differently.

One time I got this amazing haircut. It was totally sexy, swept bangs, tousled just got back from the beach sort of look. I loved it. For about a week after I swore I was getting way more attention than usual. In fact, people were even nicer to me. Even the gas station attendants! Seriously, the haircut was amazing. The more I thought about it though, the more I realized it wasn't the haircut (although spectacular) it was my attitude. I oozed sex appeal. I felt great, I walked taller, smiled more, dressed better and people noticed. I THOUGHT I looked better, so that translated into me feeling better which translated into me looking for the positive which translated into a whole different reality. All this essentially sprung from a single thought. The thought "I look good, or I feel good."

Think of how drastically we could change our lives if we just changed our thoughts. For many of us, our reality looks something like this.

"Big Body"

But what we add on to that looks something like this

Big body=fat body=ugly body=sweaty body=gross body=worthless body=no good=unlovable=not trustworthy=hopeless, etc.

Our reality is just "big body" or stripped down even further is just "body" which inherently isn't good or bad, or ugly or pretty, it just is. We choose to add all that mental bull shit on top of what's really in front of us. In revolutionary road, their reality was, married-kids-suburban home, but they chose to add on top of that, unhappy, no good, need to move to France to be happy.

Our no good, worthless, ugly body talk in a way keeps us stuck in that reality. If we continue to think of our bodies as too fat, too gross and unlovable than in fact we are keeping ourselves trapped in all that mess.

If we can start to strip away all the mental gymnastics around our lives, we may start to see a little clearer and breathe a little easier.