A shot from The Descendants has really stuck with me. The movie was filmed in Hawaii and is filled with gorgeous images, yet the particular shot that stood out to me is in no way one of the most spectacular or important: it’s not a rise of green mountains or a sweep of verdant countryside falling gently towards a far-off beach. It’s just a small, roadside creek, with occasional drops of rain hitting its gray surface. The water’s surroundings are rough and non-descript enough that you could almost wonder why the director, Alex Payne, kept it in.
But of course, it’s there for a reason. The short segment, inserted between more hefty moments of character interaction, is the kind of pause a movie needs to create its mood, to get its viewer to think what they need to. It’s also what the characters of the movie need to do, in order to cope. If a story is going to center around a family dealing with a loved one (a wife, a mother, a daughter) being taken off life support, you can’t rush it around like some frenzied action picture. You need space.
That idea kept coming back to me. Sure, we all know the “stop and smell the roses” line, but I keep returning to that phrase from new angles. Seeing it as the concept of giving yourself space, I am more strongly confronted by the idea behind the cliché. Or maybe even more so when I consider it as an image: of sitting and watching rain drops ripple outward in a small creek. Not running to the next thing like we always do or staring at some screen (only half present), but just sitting. Witnessing.
Those times on the beach at camp, when I looked overhead and saw the Milky Way spilling its way across the heavens. That time I was driving by a lake on my way from high school, a lake I had seen many times before and that was so repetitiously calm and blue that I hardly glanced at it most days, but on that fall day it was somehow transformed into large waves and a surprising, pewter gray—we never think of gray as being beautiful, but it was alive under a glowing, cloudy sky, somehow its own source of light—and I found somewhere to park nearby so I could stand by its edge and just take it in.
I’m twice the age I was at those moments and they still feed me now.
They’re not my only moments I come back to—I have many of those—but I’m never going to have so many of them that I could never use more. It’s making me wonder why I don’t sit and witness more often, even as I struggle through the end of a busy semester, which has made it increasingly hard to stop, cope, and give myself space.
Maybe the most annoying thing about clichéd wisdom like “stop and smell the roses” is how hard it often is to follow.