In Pursuit of Happyness

I just watched the movie starring Will Smith and his son. While it seems like he's taken a break from his crude comedic style and solitary drama as the last man standing on Earth, the role he plays in this movie is amazingly well captured and played out. I was brought to the edge of tears throughout the movie all the time because it is mind-blowing how a man who's so bright gets his life all wrong, and instead of giving up, he perseveres to make sure his life and those he holds dear get right again. When you see how life deals him blow after blow, it is mind-blowing how putting a smile on his son's face, a simple thing, can become his single goal, and the most difficult thing. Yet it is this selfless attitude that gives him the impetus to struggle.

It touched me because of the fact that he had his son become the most important reason to live. In his position I would have given serious thought to just ending up living my life in prison, or just ending life altogether, when it seemed that there was no use in going on. Now if you look at yourselves and our society, we cannot deny the degree of comfort most of us live in, yet our focus in life seems so wrong. It is sad when people tell me that ultimately money is the most important focus because indeed, having a stable source of income is a responsibility to yourself and the family, but the sensing I get is that the money is just there to get life rolling on, and not specifically for the sustenance of the family. I get this feeling that those I've talked to know that they need the money for the family, but why then would the family be in such a lukewarm state, as if they were just people living under one roof and nothing more?

Students of today have increasingly greater affluence and intelligence, and with the opportunities available to them, the 'dream' life is easily available to them. While lofty ambitions abound none of them would ever consider the amount of suffering a person would actually have to go through to be in their shoes. And though they need not concern themselves about having a future plagued with menial issues like not having enough money to live (because such issues evade their attention or just seem to be an impossibility in this country), we forget the stories of students who come up from nothing to bright scholars in other nations. We're just too sheltered, unaware and diffident about the suffering that people go through. What's worse is that we are unappreciative of what we don't have to go through.

As for me, I consider my current suffering trivial, and although I am probably going through a comparably tougher time than most people, I still cringe in fear as to what might really be in store for me, because I've always had this feeling about me for a really long time that I'm destined to go through a period of immense suffering that I must emerge from. I don't think this is it, so something greater (or worse) is coming soon. But like what I learnt in BMT, what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. The most wrong thing any person who's going through suffering can do is to take away their own life. It's like ending any hope of coming out a greater person. It's like abortion of their 'new-person'.

Not many people in this country know the meaning of suffering anymore, save for some unfortunate people. But a person who's never suffered before is at a loss. Sadly we are too indulgent in a hedonistic existence to ever prepare ourselves for the onslaught and ultimate purification that suffering exists, what with our party-going tendencies and easy shirking off of duties. The problem is that we find it too easy to run away from difficulties instead of allowing them to test us. For people who don't have that temptation, they inspire me and I hope that I will not take the easy way out as I have always planned to do since I was young. Because I know now that missing out that step is taking a step backward in life, and I need to know suffering so that I know what in life is important to me, and what in life is a sham.