It's Groundhog Day as I write this, and that always makes me remember the Bill Murray movie of the same name, where Murray plays a character named Phil who is stuck in the same day over and over and over again. He's always in Punxsutawney, PA, and it's always Groundhog Day. Eventually, after trying to kill himself a few times, Phil settles down to a plan of self-improvement that ultimately helps spring him from the endless loop.
So what does this excellent movie have to do with us? It lies in this little quote:
Phil: What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?
Ralph: That about sums it up for me.
And that's what it is for most of us -- we're stuck in one little place, and pretty much every day is the same as every other day. In other words, we're living the movie Groundhog Day. Yes, there are some individual variations -- somedays we eat one thing, somedays, we eat another -- and there are the big events that make our lives change on a dime -- death, birth, marriage, love, failure, unemployment are the things most people think about. But for the most of the time in our lives, we wind up being stuck in an endless loop -- lather, rinse, repeat -- that make our lives less fulfilling than they should be.
We watch the same TV shows, we eat at the same places, the wear the same types of clothes. We go the same places, with the same people, at the same times.
So, except for the people who like being in a rut (and there are plenty of people who do), what do you do about it?
You do what Phil did -- learn, grow, change, progress, even if the loop stays largely the same.
If you believe the film's director, Phil supposedly spent years in the time loop, to where he picked up so much knowledge and understanding that he became a great person, even though he started out the movie as a schmuck. We don't have some of the luxuries that our mythical Groundhog Boy had -- but we still can make a difference, learn a lot, change our lives, and become better people, with just a bit of effort and a little bit of concentrated time management.
If we choose to become who we can be, we can develop the skills to choose almost any path. Earn Nightingale was known to point out that given a bit of time and effort, a person could learn how to do brain surgery with their spare time.
Even if we don't want to become a brain surgeon, we can still become more than we have previously thought we could be -- just by adopting Phil's activities in the time loop that we call our lives.
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Copyright, 2011, by Daryl R. Gibson. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for the non-commercial redistribution of this document as long as it remains intact with this copyright and all other lines. This license does not extend to the use of this material in a compilation, whether for profit or non-profit use. Join us at http://www.Weekdaywisdom.com.
