Thursday 11th January 2024
I sit in the screening room waiting for the film to start.
The room begins to fill up with excitable people and friends catching up in a loud whisper. The whispering becomes a cacophony that makes its way around the room and serves as an undertone of noise whilst people continue to make their way to their allocated spots.
The seats themselves are the bright red colour that you see in the old cinemas and have not been built with my 6 foot height in mind, yet here I am squeezing myself into a space that my bruised knees have become all too familiar with.
I’m here alone as I often am when I come to the cinema. I’m happy with admitting that I don’t enjoy the small talk that comes with the chat at the start of the film and being here by myself makes it less of a big deal when I am the last one to leave due to my obligation to watch the credits.
As pretentious as it may seem to say, the act of watching a film is as spiritual an experience to me as sitting in church. Sitting there expectantly. Seeking. Wanting to leave feeling changed and knowing already that I will probably feel somewhat pensive and reflective as I leave to go back to my daily life.
On the way to the cinema, my Uber was caught in heavy traffic. In the car next to me was an old boss of mine.
It’s curious to me that I should be on the way to see a film titled, “Past Lives” about being rekindled with a previous life and the people that occupied those times on the same evening that I see someone from a different season of life in a city that is no longer my home. The curiosity gets the better of my attention span and leaves me with a lap full of Coke Zero before the film has even begun.
I’m thankful that I have been able to catch this title in the cinema after making a mental note to see it when it was released but not quite finding the time for it until now. It doesn’t disappoint.
A film introducing me to the Korean philosophy of In-Yeon. Nora, the main character describes it like this:
It’s an Inyeon if two strangers even walk past each other in the street and their clothes accidentally brush, because it means there must have been something between them in their past lives. If two people get married, they say it’s because there have been 8,000 layers of Inyeon over 8,000 lifetimes.
I think back to the many lifetimes I feel like I’ve lived. The what ifs that often plague my mind at bedtime when I’m trying to sleep. What would life have been like if I had become a pastor when I thought I was going to be?, or if I’d have stayed in London after the breakdown of a relationship or if, or if, or if.
Whilst I appreciate that Inyeon is more around the lives we may have had previously and comes from a Buddhist philosophy, I think we can often think back to the lives that we’ve lived and wonder what would have happened if we stayed with them and didn’t feel the pull to try something new or move somewhere else or crave a life other than the one right in front of us, that we’re living right now.
We can wonder if we made a mistake with our decisions.
The Uber driver on the way home is unexpectedly Californian. I pick up his accent straight away but I don’t say anything until he does so himself. There’s something that happens fairly frequently to me when I get into a taxi- by the end of most journeys I leave knowing much of their life stories. This journey is no different. Early on, he begins to tell me about his life. His parents moved to the UK from India and then moved to California when he was a boy. He grew up in the States and met his wife in Chicago and started a family. He had a respectable job as a University Professor in Progressive Sciences, as did his wife.
How did he find himself back in the UK and as a taxi driver? A shooting at his son’s school that became the final straw for the lack of safety he was already beginning to feel living in America. He realised that his job was taking up far too much of his life and the closeness of nearly losing his son led him to seek out a simpler life filled with what really mattered. Quality time with family.
As we come to the end of the journey, he starts on a slight monologue about how people seek out the American dream and how it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, citing Hollywood as one of the main deceptions. I can’t help but feel like this conversation was trying to tell me something about the what if of a Californian life of my own that I have since accepted is not for right now. A past life. All versions of Inyeon.
Even though there is a level of grief and curiosity around the lives that we’ve lived that maybe we wish we could go back to, these experiences allow us to learn things about ourselves that linger in the versions of us that exist in the present. It occurs to me that we need all of those connections and layers, no matter how big or small. We need them in order to bring us to where we need to be.
There will always be endless possibilities of how life could turn out.
Thanks Nessa! Once again, extremely insightful and helpful! 😀