Is it making you whole, or breaking you down? We aren’t truly defined by just what we look like, even though media campaigns would like us to think so.

Ponder this – What defines you Right now? Does is make you feel whole?

If we were married to ourselves our lives would look uncharacteristic. However, we have a union with our environments, careers, habits, routines, diet and exercise, partners, children and the close circle of our people. The culmination of these factors are the sum of our parts. But is it making us whole??

For a better illustration, let’s cue up Captain Fantastic. An indie-dramedy movie, 2016 directed by Matt Ross. The main character, Ben Cash goes through a journey that encompasses the discovery of realizations of what truly made him whole. You piece together that he and his wife, lawyer Leslie Cash, left the capitalist cycle of society and brought their six children into the wild to live on and sustain themselves in a naturalist lifestyle.  By observing the family and how they live naturally, how they intelligently educate their children (oldest gets accepted to all the top schools),  it opens your eyes to how they drastically changed parts of their lives to make a difference in their family unit. They became completely self-reliant,  hunting and foraging for their food. Educating their children to an impeccable degree through unconventional means. Small rations or books were procured from a small store in a nearby town. However, it seemed like their new philosophy of life was more a success than the so-called “American dream”. Then a phone call comes.

Then a phone call was made as Ben checks in at the local store. Ben discovered Leslie (had been in the city for a while due to illness) had killed herself. For Ben, things continue to proceed as normal at first. He tells his children, they will proceed as they always have. But slowly things unravel. Ben and the 6 kids have to travel to the city for funeral arrangements, make family visits, and be back in the city. A lot of brash comparisons come to light. Leslie and Ben’s family didn’t get along, they had called her a bitch for her strong will and ideologies on life. And Leslie’s Dad and Ben have a colorful and amusing distaste for each other and how he raises the kids. Ben’s second eldest child leaves him in search of a normalcy. He hurls hateful comments to Ben on how he just begs to feel normal, celebrate Christmas instead of philosophers and be in a school with actual peers. Ben discovers his eldest has been accepted into every prestigious college in the nation. On a Ben-style mission to rescue the 2nd eldest son, his daughter falls from a rooftop. Listening to a doctor’s prognosis on how his daughter almost died (in addition to his wife), he hits the ultimate low point. Ben gives up his children and leaves them with grandparents. He hops back into his Patridge family bus and you feel the weight of loneliness and true emptiness. Sitting in front of a fire by himself created a powerful imagery. He, now bare and alone, deeply contemplating all he knew and believed to be fantastic about wilderness living and how it spiraled into unchangeable live events.

Ben does a full reversal here. He gives up his children and leaves them with grandparents. He hops back into the Patridge family looking bus and you feel the weight of loneliness and emptiness. Sitting in front of a fire by himself created a powerful imagery. He, now bare and alone, deeply contemplating all he knew and believed to be fantastic about wilderness living and how it spiraled into unchangeable live events.  He had realized to feel “whole” he needed to accept compromises and accept the give and take of life he shares with his counterparts to yield a more complete balance for him and his children.

The end of the movie is where you see the best of all worlds come together. A person does think we should all change, but there is place in between that takes self-journeying to discover. Finding the balance to become whole, and fantastic.

See this movie.  It illustrates its worth on the message of becoming whole.

Go, set out on your own journey! Even if it starts small. Jump out of your fish bowl.

~thank you for reading~