It gets to.

I did something this week that I’ve never done before. I did it on a whim but I was also very intentional in the string of present moments that preceded it. It was spontaneous but I was also completely connected and aligned while choosing the spontaneous option. The option to go to the movies in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week, by myself. To go and see a movie that I wanted to watch for no other reason, with no other justification than, I wanted to.

In the moment that I realised that I wanted to and had just enough time to, I looked to the corner of my phone to see 11:11 staring back at me. That was nearly enough to stop the stream of reasons why I couldn’t, why I shouldn’t, why I should spend my afternoon on or with or doing something else. Almost. It was enough to help me to see those thoughts and sit with them for a bit before lifting my bag off the back of the chair it hangs on, swapping my slippers for flats and walking out the door.

I drove thirty minutes to get there with thirty minutes to spare. I bought myself a large coffee with my ticket and I sat by myself, in the wrong seat, because the one I was allocated was right next to the only other people in the cinema and I was meant to be alone. I sipped my coffee and noticed how I didn’t feel alone at all. How I was sitting by myself but also with myself to watch this movie and how that was exactly what I was being asked to do, invited to do by life.

It’s always tricky to see the movie of a book that you have really loved. I imagine it’s even more difficult to make the movie of a book you have really loved. I was there with curiosity about how they had done, whether there was more for me in this visual version of a story that I had felt and loved and taken so much from.

I didn’t feel alone at all, even as others trickled in, in pairs and threes or on their own as I was. I sat and then I fell, as the first scene opened, into another world. I felt each piece, each part of me that had connected with something in my reading of the story, come up for a second round. A look this time, with eyes that already had a sense of what they were seeing.

It was beautiful on so many levels- the cinematography, the depth of the characters I had met as words on a page, now alive onscreen, the level and variety and complexity of emotion portrayed by the brilliant actors. The hope within a devastating and heartbreaking story. The pain and the hope right up against each other somehow felt beautiful, maybe because so much of life is exactly that.

I had followed and had a sense of what this movie meant to the woman who wrote it’s story and the man who felt he had to make that story into a movie. I had heard them speak about what they wanted me and others, everyone, to know. I felt so many things click in me, shift and move in me as I watched. I felt my knowing and understanding grow. I sat marvelling at how they had done it, how it is even possible.

Possible for one person to write an incredible story out of her life and experiences, someone else to take that story and turn it into something true to it but also completely transformed and for someone else to read the story, watch the movie and feel themselves change and grow and understand the world a little better because of it. It’s incredible really and when it is done as well as I feel this example was, it can feel like magic, maybe even magic for the world.

This world and the people in it who are seeing and resisting and grieving so many things ending. So many versions of ‘It Ends With Us’, the big things and the little things, are really so many things that GET TO end with us.

Being told by others who I am, should be, can be and what I can want in my life- gets to end with me.

Never putting something I want before all of the things others want for or of me- gets to end with me.

Pretending that things that hurt me or are hard for me aren’t a big deal- gets to end with me.

Living disconnected from myself to make connections and interactions with others feel smoother- gets to end with me.

Ending things is hard.

But alongside the pain of it can be hope. The things that end with us are the things that will be different for our children. There can be hope when we think about what it means for them.