Forrest Gump was a lot of peoples’ hero. His life exemplified a kind of flow as he did not sweat the small stuff and kept his “destiny” in mind, the one his momma told him to stay after. He wondered if that feather that kept showing up in his life (you may remember the visual) was him, floating around purposelessly, or did he have a destiny underneath his disjointed life episodes. Eventually, he reconciled the polarity of both chance and meaning. He tells Jenny, who was then gone, as he looks at her grave with tears, “…perhaps it is both Jenny. Perhaps both is happening at the same time.”
So indeed it seems, both “is” happening—thanks Forrest. I got to thinking about this for Andy Weiner and Elliott Spitzer and Lance Armstrong. Did they learn about life from their very public mistakes? Are they in touch with the deep lessons, their destiny and the chances that occur? Or are they more like Gatsby than Forrest, boats beaten back ceaselessly by the current of life into a past to which they have yet to be reconciled, but, like Gatsby tragically shows, so want to escape. Here is where I wrote a bit more about that, in my Psychology Today blog.
Image by Hariadhi (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons
