The act of changing our routine is good for us. Even something as simple as rearranging apps on a phone helps us to resist the automatic default of muscle memory.
As Tara Brach put it: “Perhaps the biggest tragedy in our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns . . . We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.”
The discomfort zone
A kind of timidity can set in with familiarity. A fear of change. We can end up stuck in jobs we don’t like, in unhealthy relationships, with similar unhelpful attitudes. We call this the “comfort zone” but often it is the opposite. A discomfort zone, a stagnation zone, an unfulfilled zone. It is surprisingly easy to walk through and out, once we decide to. And what we see beyond the discomfort zone is in fact a deeper comfort. The comfort of being the best possible version of us. Beyond the pattern or code of established behavior. Less coded, more human.
Stuff
You don’t always have to do stuff. Or achieve stuff. You don’t have to spend your free time productively. You don’t have to be doing Tai Chi and DIY and bread-making. Sometimes you can just be and feel things and get through and eat chips and survive, and that is more than enough.
Ferris Bueller and the meaning of life
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) is the best teen movie of all time but for years I had a problem with it, even though I enjoyed it immensely. John Hughes’s tale of a popular teenager skipping school by faking illness, then having a sensational day out in Chicago with his best friend and girlfriend, annoyed me because I thought Ferris was selfish and this seemed like a movie where liking the central character was essential for its enjoyment. My issue was that he uses his best friend, Cameron, by making him take his dad’s vintage Ferrari on their adventure, even though Cameron will get in major trouble for this.
Rewatching the movie, though, I realized I’d got it all wrong. Really, this isn’t a movie about the eponymous Ferris. This is a movie about Cameron. Cameron is the emotional center of the film. He is the one who makes the most significant transition—from a depressed, possibly suicidal, outwardly privileged teenager who frets about the perceived meaninglessness of a future containing college and adulthood, to someone with self-esteem, who is able to live in the present, and to stand up to his strict father and his oppressive rules.
When Ferris starts the movie with his famous monologue he talks straight to the camera, but the core message is one he spends the rest of the film teaching Cameron: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Ferris is basically a 1980s version of Marcus Aurelius saying, “Dwell on the beauty of life.” He is a mix of Eastern and Western philosophy. Buddhist mindfulness fused with American individualism—though he wouldn’t want to be part of any -ism. “A person shouldn’t believe in an -ism,” says Ferris. “He should believe in himself.” But Ferris isn’t just out for himself. He is out for his friend too. He is out for us. As with all the most comforting films, the film gives us permission to feel. It helps us live.
Films that comfort
Jaws. Because it shows that we need to acknowledge our fears before we beat them.
Meet Me in St. Louis. Because of the songs. Because of the colors. Because of Judy Garland singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Because it invites us into the beautiful and bittersweet comfort of another time, another place, another family, another reality. And because I watched it on a day I felt terrible and it gave me a better place to exist.
The Great Escape. Because it shows that you can cope with any situation so long as you are building a tunnel out of it.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Because it exudes a golden fireside glow and makes us remember that we can live forever inside a freeze-frame if it is a good enough moment (see also the end of The 400 Blows and The Breakfast Club).
E.T. Because you become a child again when you watch it.
It’s a Wonderful Life. Because it makes you realize your existence has unseen value.
The Peanut Butter Falcon. Because it shows the redemptive power of friendship.
The Count of Monte Cristo (2002 version). Because this swashbuckling adventure is the definition of escapism.
Pretty in Pink. Because it has the greatest pop soundtrack in the history of cinema.
Ray . Because well-crafted biopics are always inspiring, especially when the subject is Ray Charles.
My Neighbor Totoro. Because Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece is a film about the power of wonder and magic to comfort us through traumatic times.
Harvey . Because it is James Stewart talking to an invisible rabbit.
Breaking Away . Because it is a highly underrated film about cycling that I watched when I was feeling low and found solace in its gentle comedy and drama.
Any Mission Impossible movie. Because there is something comforting about watching Tom Cruise risk his life to defy the laws of Newtonian physics.
The Sound of Music. Because it shows how love and music and joy can’t be suppressed by the darkest forces in history.
Bringing Up Baby . Because of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant and because, despite being released in 1938, it remains one of the funniest films ever made.
Toy Story 2. Because it is the greatest and most emotional and consoling Pixar movie, for Jessie’s story alone.
Stand by Me. Because despite being a film about a search for a dead body, it is a celebration of youth and friendship and life.
Mary Poppins. Because it is Mary Poppins.
Negative capability
The poet John Keats coined the phrase “negative capability”: meaning when someone “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It’s about embracing a kind of vulnerability.
For Keats, Shakespeare was the person who embodied this concept perfectly, as he created work that was full of a beauty that was incomplete and ambiguous and allowed for many possible meanings.
Keats never heard Miles Davis play, but maybe he’d have recognized negative capability in his music. “Don’t play what’s there,” the musician famously said. “Play what’s not there.”
Negative capability is about the space beyond what we know, which we should be prepared to reach if we want to find beauty.
“With a great poet,” wrote Keats, the most Zen of the Romantics, “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”