Those things which we take most for granted are usually the same things that we could not do without. It’s the paradox of familiarity: we sometimes say nastiness to those we love the most because familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least laziness: we assume there will always be time for amends. We go from day to day assuming that the last words we say to our wife, daughter, parents that day won’t be the last words. We take for granted that we’ll wake up in the morning and be able to start, if not afresh, certainly again.
The alarm clock chirps and without thinking of the miracle unfolding in front of us, we casually slide our arm from under the sheet and smack another seven minutes of silence out of the clock. When we finally pull ourselves out of bed, an entire ballet of muscular motion has made it possible to sit up on the edge of the bed and rub our eyes in an attempt to smear the last bits of drowsiness away. A yawn is an engineering marvel that goes unappreciated, and lacing our shoes is as complicated as any dance.
Certainly that which we waste the most of is that which we can never replenish: time. We waste it as if our present moment were eternity, as if we were some kind of god, able to alter time and space and make an endless loop of tomorrows. Of all the meaningful things I could do with my time on a Friday night, for example, why do I sit and troll YouTube videos or play chess? “One day I will take all the photos and memories I have of Poland and write a book,” I promise myself continually, yet there’s always a caveat: “But not tonight. Tonight, I just want to relax,” and I load chess.com and drive myself to frustration over a silly game.
These three are related: the ability to move freely and the time to do so allows us to place our bodies in nearest proximity to those who mean the most to us. With few exceptions, these freedoms are universal, even in the most repressive regimes. It’s rare that something takes them away, at once, in a flash. It is necessarily an act of aggression, an imprisonment, a forcible, irresistible subjection of one’s will to the will of another.
Sometimes we imprison ourselves through misplaced priorities. We watch YouTube videos when there are more productive goals; we go to a class instead of attending our daughter’s performance; we rush conversations with our parents because some trifle is more important at the moment.
Occasionally, though, we’re blessed: something shakes us out of our assumption that that which we have now will never change and is therefore not worth cherishing fully at this moment. It might be something we experience that shakes us, that turns our head around, that lifts us for a moment to see where we stand and forces us to appreciate the view, regardless of what it might be.
Usually, though, it’s a vicarious glimpse of someone else’s experience, and often it’s an experience that we find ourselves wondering whether we could endure it, much less profit from it in any way. Watching The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (or reading it, I would assume–something that’s now a high priority) is just such an experience. French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby, almost completely paralyzed by a massive stroke, wrote the entire book by blinking his left eye, the only part of his body that he could move. Claude Mendibil recited the letters of the French alphabet in order of their frequency, and Bauby blinked his left eye when he heard the next letter of the word he wanted to dictate. “E S A I T N R U L O” began Mendibil again and again until Bauby dictated, letter by letter, the entire text of the memoir he composed and edited in his head. That alone says more than most could in a lifetime of babbling.
It is, in short, a film all should see.