by Carla Marie Ciampa on October 1, 2009
George Monroe is dying. Before he goes he has a few things to put in order. His relationship with his dead father, and his relationship with his contemptuous son, Sam. His father abruptly killed himself, George’s mother and another woman while drunk driving. He also permanently injured a little girl. And Sam is slowly killing himself with drugs and recklessness.
In Life as a House George tells Sam they are going to work together to build a house on the ocean front property George’s father left him. After George’s death, Sam gives the house to the injured little girl (now grown), and we have a sense that all is right with the Monroe Family now. Over the credits we hear George’s voice:
“I always thought of myself as a house. I was always what I lived in. It didn’t need to be big. It didn’t even need to be beautiful. It just needed to be mine. I became what I was meant to be. I built myself a life. I built myself a house.”
Thinking of your life as a house? Are you a big house or little one? Are you fancy or plain? Our houses may all be stylistically different but inside they’re all basically the same. A few walls and a roof. It protects you. It keeps you warm in winter and dry in the rain. But underneath there’s the foundation, there’s the strength and you build on that.
Surely your house has marks on the walls and scratches on the floor. They all do. So you repaint the walls and buff the floor. There are things in the basement, dark things, you never show company. Eventually you sort through those boxes, keep the stuff you need and throw out the rest. Everyday you decide how will you decorate your house, your life.
Today is my birthday and, strangely enough, I’m selling my house. My life is moving from one place to another. I’m taking what I’ve built and hoping it’s portable. I’m hoping the foundation is strong enough. I’m moving on, growing as a person and adding on to my life. As I look around my old house, then ahead to the next year, I wonder if my life as a house is moving in a good direction? Am I becoming what I’m meant to be? I hope so. I also hope I’m increasing my property value!
by Carla Marie Ciampa on August 19, 2009
Ocean’s Eleven, Danny Ocean, mastermind thief turns to Linus his partner in crime during the vault heist and says:
Linus: You know, you lose focus in this game for one second…
Danny: I know, somebody gets hurt.
This is a fact the permeates all our doings in every part of our life. I know this because I have lived; I was reminded of this because my mother lived through a car accident. She turned her head away from the road for a fraction of a second and the resulting crash left her banged and bruised and all of us wiser for the wear.
I reminds me of my first driving lesson.
Like every almost sixteen year old, I was eager to learn to drive; and like most parents, my dad was less than eager to teach me. However the day finally came one lovely Saturday afternoon, after much haranguing, my dad agreed to take me out on a drive. As you can imagine I practically flew out of the house with the keys in one hand and a song in my heart. I jumped in his then almost brand new 1987 Nissan Maxima and started the engine, put down all the windows and turned on the radio…loud. My dad came out of the house minutes later the find me dancing to “Holiday” in the driver’s seat. He opened the door, got in the passenger seat turned to me and in his best dad voice said, “Shut the radio, and shut the engine. Immediately.”
“Oh, great” I thought to myself, “this is going to be no fun at all.”
When silence returned to the car, my father turned to me and he said, “Listen to me very closely. This is an automobile. It is not a toy. And driving is not a game. This is an automobile and it weighs thousands of pounds. And the smallest error in judgment on your part, one second of fiddling with the radio and you can change your life and someone else’s forever. Every time you get into the car think long and hard about where your attention is, and where it needs to be.”
I grew up a lot that day, and have never gotten into the car since without flashing to that moment. It’s probably saved my life, and maybe some others, in many ways. Today I look around as I drive and I see distracted, overwhelmed people. People in a rush, drinking their coffee, patting their lap dogs and generally unaware of the thousands pounds of machine they are carelessly in control of.
Don’t be that person. Stop what you’re doing and just drive. Use your signals, stop rushing, move carefully fom here to there. Remember the life you save may be your own, or mine, or my mother’s.