Hope and Change

Hope and Change

I write today after returning home from a morning movie with my wife, my two children, and two of their friends. Like many who are fortunate enough to still enjoy the luxury of going to an occasional movie in these difficult economic times, we chose a morning movie for the much more affordable ticket pricing. Today, we enjoyed The Croods (www.thecroodsmovie.com/ ) by DreamWorks.

The Croods are billed as “the first modern family.” It is the animated story of a prehistoric family whose world is literally crumbling and their subsequent adventure. “THE CROODS is a comedy adventure that follows the world's first modern family through the journey of a lifetime. When the cave that has always been their home is destroyed – with the rest of their world not far behind it – The Croods are forced to set off on the first family road (or path) trip. Rocked by generational clashes and seismic shifts, The Croods discover an incredible new world filled with fantastic creatures, and a future beyond any they imagined.”

All six of us, young and old enjoyed this captivating story of the Croods. Although not advertised as such, The Croods reminded me how much movies can be a metaphor for our current times. Just think about how many popular movies over the past few years have shared that same theme of a changing times. Think about the wildly successful movie The Hunger Games last year. The Hunger Games took us to a world in which the world as we know it had collapsed and the subsequent dark culture that arose from it. Just this weekend, we had the premier of  Olympus Has Fallen ( http://olympusmovie.com/ ) where the unthinkable happens, with the White House and the President falling into the hands of a terrorist group.

The movies that we watch often serve as a metaphor for our concerns and worries. We may often fear the worst for the future. Movies such as Hunger Games allow us to identify with some character who survives against the overwhelming odds of the horrific cultural changes. Like the character of the movie, we see ourselves surviving in the challenging times.

The Croods though, I would suggest, provide us with a very important twist on this movie metaphor. The twist is so very important and offers us a lesson relevant to our happiness and maybe even our health. Typically these changing times movies provide us with metaphorical survival in a dark and depressing world. What makes The Croods different though is the fact that rather than the metaphorical survival in the dark, depressing new world order; the Croods as the synopsis suggests, “…discover an incredible new world…”

The difference offers us a lesson in how we as individuals approach the current times of change. All too easily, the news and our movies offer us a bleak, depressing vision of the future. We can envision a miserable future in which we simply survive; or we can envision a future in which we thrive. Personally, I hope to thrive!