Last night I watched The Deep Blue Sea. It wasn’t particularly good, and except from a stunning Rachel Weisz and the beautiful soundtrack, the movie didn’t say much to me. Rachel plays a woman living in the 50s, married to an older guy- or should I just say old- who adores her. But she is unhappy and has an affair with a younger, more passionate guy. This is the classical Hollywood recipe of what great love is made of. And this is in fact what everything, from literature to movies teaches us. That the more complicated, twisted and impossible love is, the more it’s worth having. When Rachel leaves her cold, boring husband to go live with the man she loves, she is not prepared to face the inevitable: after a while, her man will start having more important things to do than make crazy love to her. And so she decides to kill herself. Not because of him, of course, but because of her incapacity to be happy. Or so she claims in her suicidal letter.
There is, however, an extraordinary moment in the movie. Rachel’s neighbour, and old lady who finds her after the failed attempt to commit suicide, is taking care of her dying husband. And she says to Rachel: “Do you think you know what love is? What you have is not love because love means wiping someone’s ass, changing the sheets when they’ve wet the bed for both of you to be able to keep your dignity and go on living.” Even though there is no such thing as the definition of love, we all try at some point in our lives to define it. And I can’t say for sure I know what love is, but I am certain is not what Rachel thinks. This is perhaps because she does what we all do: run. She runs from a man who loves her and after another who doesn’t love her just as much. So she becomes her husband. This movie made me think of how we get bored with what we have and keep chasing what is not making itself available to us. And thus the idea of love is just ego. Our needy nature , always in the pursuit of attention, validation and reassurance only to throw it in the garbage once we have it.
Lust, passion, sex, the thrill of something or someone new, excitement and attachement are not love. And the whole idea of romance is most of the time a fairytale. We meet people, we fall in love, we live stories- some good, some bad and some extraordinary.But maybe love is just the ability to be kind, to know forgiveness or to live your life exactly how you want to live it. Or maybe love truly is what remains in the absence of everything else.
The most valuable things I have learned so far came from what people are, not from what they do. I keep coming back to this little obsession of mine with people who become human doings rather than human beings and that is because I feel more and more how everything revolves around what we do. And what we do is about succes, and succes is usually measured in fame or money. I, for one, have never shared this commun belief that people can only influence or help others by building something big. And I know at least two of them who can prove my point.
The first is my mother who has never had the successful career most modern women are dying for. She wasn’t a stay at home mum either, but although she has always worked, she managed to be the most wonderful parent I could have ever wished for. She gave me so much love, attention and has helped me try to become the best self I can be. And today, she taught me something once again. She was telling me how my sister who’s studying in an arts school called her crying that she’ll never be good enough with her painting. And my mum told her not to give up every time the road gets rough because all she needs to do is have passion for something. She doesn’t have to be Michelangelo in order to be happy as long as she loves what she’s doing. Mum also said that even though you feel that what you are doing is shit, you could at least try to make that shit an original one. She is now translating a book about Tarantino and told my sister that he was a visionary man, intelligent enough to make art and to innovate something other people threw away. He used violence, kitsch and old actors in order to create an unique style that many have tried to copy years later. Tarantino only made 6 movies but he influenced cinematography simply by pursuing his passion. As a child, he started watching movies with his mother but he didn’t get an expensive education or a luxurious lifestyle. He only wanted to do something he loved and most important, he wanted to be himself. He didn’t want to be Fellini.
The other person is Hannah, my flatmate. She turns 30 in two days and was supposed to go on a lovely trip with her boyfriend. But today she found out he is trapped in Cape Town because of some issues with his visa and won’t be able to make it. I would have freaked out, been mad at him, probably yelled on the phone for hours and then be sad for days. Hannah, on the other hand, handled this with calm and didn’t, for one second, blame him for something that wasn’t his fault. We’ve been living together for almost 2 years now and all of this time I’ve admired her for her understanding, non-judgemental and compassionate nature. I have learned a lot from what she is like and am trying everyday to be kinder.
There are many other people I’m learning from, however, today I chose to write about those who didn’t build companies, made millions or became famous. And that’s for one simple reason: they are not less happy or less wonderful than those who have.
I have never been one of those happy people who smile all the time. I have never been able to feel better just at the thought that there is always someone in a worse situation than mine. I mean, how can I relate to a starving kid in Africa and all of the sudden feel grateful for being able to afford a steak? Happiness itself is a very vague notion and I would be a hypocrite no to admit that what the kid in Africa and I need to have in order to be happy might be very different. You could say being happy is not about having things, it’s about giving, sharing, loving and all that. Which is true to some extent. Being surrounded by people I love and who in return love me, fills my heart with joy and warmth. But so does affording to buy books, go to the opera, travel, or a new pair of shoes. Of course it’s not the same kind of happiness, many would say, but since when should we divide happiness in that worth feeling and the frivolous one? As long as I feel good, I see no reason to do so. A life full of Manolo Blahnik shoes and no one to love me would indeed be sad. And a life with someone to love me and nothing to wear on my feet would be just as sad.
Even though I’m not one of those people who are happy all the time, I’m not one of those who don’t have the ability to be happy at all either. And this is something to be grateful for. Sometimes is the perfect blue sky, other times a good book or a weekend in Paris. And believe it or not, most of the times is very small things like meeting a friend who’s going through difficult times but who hasn’t lost his optimism, sharing a horrible, microwaved pancake with my best friend or my mum posting on my Facebook wall that she misses me. All we hear since our early lives is that money doesn’t bring happiness, that it’s wrong to desire big and expensive things, that we should always put ourselves in the shoes of those less fortunate, appreciate what we have instead of complaining for what we don’t have and so on. In other words, we should all be the Dalai Lama or Mother Theresa. Call it Western civilisation brain wash, shallowness or whatever you want, but I never tried to be them. And this is precisely because I don’t think certain kinds of happiness are better than others. Just to be able to feel happy is enough for me, or at least enough to actually be, happy.