i’m my own experiment
"Live and do what you like. Life's a dream. In a dream, you can't make mistakes. In a dream, you can be... whatever you want."
These words, in particular, from Terrence Malick's film "To The Wonder," stood out to me recently, in a way they previously hadn't.
One of my favorite scenes in cinema involves two gorgeous women talking in French and Italian in downtown Bartlesville, Oklahoma, strolling and looking around, feeling out of place. Marina's Italian friend Anna, who also moved to Bartlesville, pops out of nowhere and leaves just as quickly.
An explosion of integrity, vitality, and yearning.
Anna tells Marina that she should leave this small town, leave her small-minded husband while she's still full of dreams, young and beautiful.
In one of my favorite film quotes, she says "life's a dream. In a dream you can't make mistakes."
Zooming into her sun-glowed face, Marina seems to be considering this in light of her supposed mistake of marrying and leaving France, even though to her friend, it wasn't a mistake.
Marina is free, even though she feels trapped.
Anna regrets not leaving sooner. She says this town is all false, everyone has dead hearts. It's too cramped!
Walking a little further down the street, away from the main part of town, she grabs Marina's bag and drops it into a bush, saying they will pick it up later, much to Marina's horror.
Anna is unfiltered, loud about her desires, which makes people uncomfortable, and optimistic about her future (she says she wants to break these chains and be free) while being compassionate towards herself.
Anna knows she is free to make a choice even though she hasn't moved away yet. That is freedom, the liberating power of choice.
For me, a chosen role model.
I've been thinking a lot about mistakes lately, feeling the emotion of regret and missed opportunities, and how it's intertwined with experimentation.
But I'm more like Marina right now, ruminating about the past. For some reason, my past choices have been weighing on me more than usual. Much like Marina looking back while Anna is telling her to move and look forward.
Further again, in a more residential, quiet part of town, Anna says, "I'm my own experiment."
I love this concept. The throughline of this blog is about my different learning and life experiments. I see everything through trial and error. Because I'm so quick to start things (unless it involves mundane, admin stuff), I don't see what I'm doing until I've already done it and I see pretty quickly whether it has panned out or not. I label these experiments that haven't panned out "mistakes."
I talked about this in another blog post where I wrote about how making a ton of mistakes and logging them, lessons and all, is one way to live.
Mistakes, freedom, and experimentation all swirl together. One can't have experimentation without mistakes, and one can't have the exhilarating feeling of freedom without experimenting.
I'm free because I'm my own experiment, the biggest experiment of all.