What is dream?
Joe Gardner can tell you.
The dream of Joe is to be recognized for his musical talent, to be able to perform with top-notch jazz players, to become a serious jazz pianist, not to get a stable full-time teaching job, pension and medical insurance are not his Looking forward to the future, being able to always perform music on the stage of his dreams is what he thinks is the greatest meaning of life.
And the dream is the constant driving force for Joe, so even after he called and fell into the sewer without looking at the road, he was unwilling to accept the ending of his own death, on the moving elevator to the Great Beyond (for the time being It's an elevator) I keep running down, I don't want to be overtaken, I just want to die. After all, the audition was approved by a famous jazz musician, and he hasn't performed on the same stage yet! How can you just die and go to the Great Beyond!
He fell into the world of Great Before, which is "before the world", where unborn and unborn souls need to develop their own personalities, and they need to obtain sparks, and when they accumulate seven, they can get the pass of the earth, and they can ascend to adults to experience the world. (Cross the robbery?). That is, Joe was mistakenly regarded as a mentor by the Jerrys, and met the unborn little wandering spirit with the code "22".
22 is a difficult wandering spirit. If you want to ask how long 22 has been in the Great Before, you may not even know about 22, at least a hundred thousand years! Maybe only the Jerrys know. There are not thousands of 22 mentors, but there must be hundreds. Many famous people in history have been 22 mentors, such as Gandhi, Lincoln, Mother Teresa, and Jung. The last spark gets a pass to reincarnate on Earth.
A wandering spirit who did not want to be reincarnated as an adult to live on Earth once, an undead who desperately wanted to continue living in the world (in fact, he was not completely dead), so he decided to make a deal. Joe helped 22 get the final spark and got The Earth Pass is given to Joe who wants to stay alive, while 22 can skip the reincarnation live on Earth and stay in the Great Before. Of course, 22 is also curious, why Joe wants to return to Earth and live again, after all, for 22, "have never seen anything that's make me want to live."
Of course, the story doesn't always go smoothly.
The two souls went through a very old-fashioned plot, 22 fell into the body of Joe who was lying on a hospital bed and had not yet woken up, and Joe became the hospital's therapy cat.
What happened in New York within half a day later gave both souls a new harvest, and both got their best ending.
When Joe came out of the hospital with 22 as a cat, 22 was not used to the crowded New York streets, Joe said to 22 "this is new york, you don't stop in the middle of the road. go. go. go. "Doesn't this mean our life? We are always pushed forward invisibly on the road of life, and everything around us is telling us to go forward and not stop! But what we can stop is not to move forward quickly, and we need to stop, like 22, when we are hungry, need food, and need to replenish energy, we do not have to keep moving forward.
Joe the cat stole a piece of pizza and gave it to the hungry 22. At this time, 22 finally realized the deliciousness of pizza. In Hall of Everything, souls can neither smell the food nor taste it. Delicious food, but asking an unborn soul to find a spark is really buggy.
But this is also a place where a bug should exist, because only after 22's real experience as Joe did he know the taste of pizza, the shape of the wind, the sweetness of lollipops, the moving music, and the beauty of laughter , Knowing that living is not a bad thing, living is not bad!
When Joe saw many disappointments and frustrations in his life in the retrospective exhibition of his life, he felt that "my life is meaningless". Because he feels that he has not realized his dream, but he has died, and all the past in life is meaningless, because he believes that dream (piano) is the purpose and meaning of his life as a human being. For Joe, "music is my reason for living," he feared "if i died today, that my life would be amounted to nothing."
We always have the illusion that achieving or getting the goal we dream of can define our life and achieve the meaning of our life. Joe, like most people, has been striving for the meaning of life in this world, seeking the goal that can realize the value of life. But 22, through Joe's body, allowed Joe to see those wonderful notes he hadn't seen in the retrospective of his life.
Joe has always thought that sparks are the meaning of being born as a human being. When life is born, it should be the goal of being born to do something, be someone, but Jerry smiled softly after hearing it, so basic.
My understanding is that sparks are not purposes, they are means.
22 The spark that was finally filled was jazzing. The jazzing here did not refer to jazz, but the notes of life he felt as Joe. Those notes were when he walked with his feet and tasted the first pizza. It's the love song of singers in the subway, the sincere communication with Dez the barber in the barbershop, the shape of a tie blown from the subway vent, the clouds in the city sky, the love stitched by Joe's mother's needle and thread , is the laughter of a father swaying his daughter across the street, is the laughter among friends in a roadside restaurant, is a leaf falling from a tree at dusk, is the composition of thousands of thousands of things in this world, is the composition of everything out the music.
There are some very casual details that show Joe's changes before and after. For example, in the retrospective exhibition of life, Joe was alone in the restaurant eating food, full of disappointment and gloom after the performance was rejected, and when he was looking back on the beautiful life in front of the piano, he was also alone in the restaurant, but Joe It is to savor and enjoy a piece of cake. Such comparisons, with Joe or with you and me, are all life, and they are all tiny notes in life one after another, and they make up the song of life.
When Joe finally returned to his body, he excitedly ran to the jazz bar and impassionedly said "my only purpose on this planet is to play" and got a valuable performance opportunity. But after the performance, he felt a little lonely, he asked Dorothea "what happen next?", and the answer he got was "we come back tomorrow night and do it all again." The happy smile faded from Joe's face , because he felt that the dream that he had been pursuing in this life would come true now would be different, he thought that after the dream came true, it should not be do it all again, so Dorothea told him the story of the fish.
Seeing this, I think of the famous phrase "living elsewhere". We are all fish living in the water, always yearning for the sea, thinking that the sea is so vast and free, but we ignore that we are actually in the sea all the time, because all things are one, the sea is water, and water is also the sea . Life is nowhere else, only in the present moment.
When Joe looked at the small physical evidence that 22 left behind, he saw the beautiful notes in his life in front of the piano, and finally understood the meaning of spark, and filled in the blanks that 22 finally completed. The Earth Pass was given back to 22, and he smiled and said that he "already did it", and this time it was time for 22 to go to Earth for a lifetime.
Some of my favorite episodes:
1. In the retrospective exhibition of life, Joe's life scenes were full of gloom and frustration. The stage he longed for never extended an olive branch to him. He could only hold a part-time teaching job in a local school in Queens, New York ( MS 70 in the movie is fictional, New York's public schools are made up of the letters PS and numbers), teaching music to the children of the school band.
Of course, teaching and educating people is not completely a failure. After all, the child he taught, Curley, is now playing in the team of well-known musicians, and it was this disciple who achieved his perfect audition and got his dream. stage performance opportunities. As a result, there is a beautiful fragment of Joe sitting in front of the piano and recalling the old professor Curley.
2. At Joe's house, 22 had a very brief conversation with Connie, a student who came to see Joe, because Connie wanted to give up learning the trombone, and 22 took over the school's trombone from Connie without hesitation. , This action made Connie change her decision to give up. She played the repertoire she practiced the day before in front of 22. She was very devoted to the performance, which made people see the light of the kind of people who love. After the performance, she followed 22 said that she will not give up and will continue to go to school to participate in practice courses.
Joe was convinced after listening to 22's description, because he knew that Connie really loved the trombone, so he wouldn't give up easily. But at that time, Connie was 22. If Connie said to give up in front of Joe, maybe Joe would persuade him, and he might really give up. At that time, 22 calmly accepted the trombone that Connie handed over. This action was the biggest reason for Connie to be shaken, I think.
Humans are animals that do not want to lose. When you have a thing (or a person?) and take it away from you, you will be very resistant, sad and sad, and you will not accept the loss. Just like Connie wouldn't take 22 trombones away. So giving up really wasn't that easy for Connie.
3. In the barbershop, the screenwriter used 22 to ask various philosophical questions, such as "Is all this living really worth dying for?", "you're born to do something, but how do you figure out what that thing is? what if you pick up the wrong thing?" The creators don't use 22 to give answers to these philosophical questions, but through 22's conversation with barber Dez, let's get to the heart of these questions. For example, Dez is not Born to be a barber. He once dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, but due to family reasons, he could only choose a cheap hairdresser course for further education, and eventually became a hairdresser, not the veterinarian he once dreamed of, but he did not He didn't live his life with self-pity. Instead, he enjoyed the happiness his career brought him. He would meet all kinds of people in the barbershop and discuss all kinds of things with all kinds of people. These are the source of his daily happiness. , He does not feel that not becoming a veterinarian is the biggest regret in his life, but he loves his profession.
4. The conversation between the barber shop and Dez made Joe a little disappointed. Joe thought he and Dez were good friends because they would chat about jazz together, but it wasn't until that moment that Joe realized that he didn't know his friend at all. Knowing Dez's dreams, because he used to only talk to Dez about his dreams. At that moment, Joe suddenly realized that he seemed to be missing something.
Yes, we talk to ourselves a lot of the time, but we never really listen to those who matter to us. We are always so focused on ourselves that we ignore other people and events around us.
5. There is another person in the barber shop, Paul, and this is also the person we need to pay attention to, because these people are always "bring other people down, so they can make themselves feel better", and they are "criticising me to cover up" the pain of his own failed dreams.”
So when someone like that is around you, don't get too involved in the conversation, just give a shit. Of course, I also hope that everyone will not become such a person, because although life is not only the purpose or meaning of dreams, we should not despise the lives or dreams of others.
6. Joe was a single dog until he became a soul. 22 found the Lisa in his life, so 22 asked him when to call Lisa, but Joe said "I don't have time for relationship right now", And 22 teased him after listening to him and said "you wanna wait till you die second time?"
Many times we miss a lot of things or people under the excuse of "no time". We always feel that we have time to do these things or meet some people after we don't have time now, but accidents may come sooner than tomorrow, "No time" really becomes "no tomorrow", and we don't have Joe's situation. We can become souls and return to the world to experience life again.
7. Joe took 22 to the subway. As a cat, Joe was always there, thinking about how to realize his plan to return to his body step by step, so that he could appear at the jazz bar at night and meet his admirers. The jazz musicians played together, but 22 suddenly heard the moving singing of the subway buskers, that voice moved 22, and said in the hall of everything before "i don't like music sounds. It feels like little too much" A sharp contrast was formed.
8. Seeing those people with dull eyes in the shaking carriage, isn't that what most of us do in our daily lives! "Everyday the same thing, day in and day out." In our day-to-day life, we have lost our enthusiasm for life, and the children have tossed us so hard to talk about our dreams. Joe is lucky, this middle-aged man is still so passionate in pursuit of his dreams, even if his father relies on his mother's sewing shop to pay all kinds of living expenses in order to achieve his dreams, he still can't see life The reality is that he can continue to ride on the road of his dreams and fall into the repaired sewer without a manhole cover.
In the end, I hope we can all be like the reborn Joe,
"LIVE EVERY MINUTE OF YOUR LIFE!"
View more about Soul reviews
