The Season of… Ambiguity
One of Tom and my favorite movies is Pleasantville. There are certain things in life that come up again and again from the movie that seem to fit with how we experience the world. When we moved to High Point almost six years ago, we were lost an incredible amount of the time. Check out any Mid-western town on a map and you get some nice, square blocks—winding roads that regularly change from one name to another threw us for a loop. We would joke, “What’s at the end of Main Street? Why, of course, the beginning of Main Street!” The weather report on the news each morning that first February was one day after another of, “Sunny with a high of 72 and a low of 68.” For real? Yup. For real. Day after day of Pleasantville.
If you haven’t seen Pleasantville, in a very brief nutshell, it’s a movie about change—how things like knowledge and exploration alter how we experience the world. It is a progression from the known into the unknown. Pleasantville as a town moves from constant and predictable to the murky waters of giant question marks. The closing scenes of Pleasantville include the characters sitting on a park bench—“What happens next?” [queue puzzled look] “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
So it is fitting then that this transition for us from “Pleasantville,” North Carolina, back to the “Homeland,” has a lot of question marks as well. I feel like I say, “I don’t know,” quite a lot right now. The Presbyterian Women’s meeting today was on the seasons of our lives. I suppose whatever season we are in in life, there is an enormous amount of ambiguity. Thank you for traveling with me through some of mine.
Grace and peace,
Jess
One of Tom and my favorite movies is Pleasantville. There are certain things in life that come up again and again from the movie that seem to fit with how we experience the world. When we moved to High Point almost six years ago, we were lost an incredible amount of the time. Check out any Mid-western town on a map and you get some nice, square blocks—winding roads that regularly change from one name to another threw us for a loop. We would joke, “What’s at the end of Main Street? Why, of course, the beginning of Main Street!” The weather report on the news each morning that first February was one day after another of, “Sunny with a high of 72 and a low of 68.” For real? Yup. For real. Day after day of Pleasantville.
If you haven’t seen Pleasantville, in a very brief nutshell, it’s a movie about change—how things like knowledge and exploration alter how we experience the world. It is a progression from the known into the unknown. Pleasantville as a town moves from constant and predictable to the murky waters of giant question marks. The closing scenes of Pleasantville include the characters sitting on a park bench—“What happens next?” [queue puzzled look] “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
So it is fitting then that this transition for us from “Pleasantville,” North Carolina, back to the “Homeland,” has a lot of question marks as well. I feel like I say, “I don’t know,” quite a lot right now. The Presbyterian Women’s meeting today was on the seasons of our lives. I suppose whatever season we are in in life, there is an enormous amount of ambiguity. Thank you for traveling with me through some of mine.
Grace and peace,
Jess
