I may be nearly a year behind, but a few weeks ago, I finally finished watching LOST. I’ll admit it, I teared up at the end (during the final episode, appropriately titled, “The End”) as I realized that my 121-episode journey with these characters was coming to a close.
I don't have to mention that it's not just a superb, even groundbreaking, television series – though that is certainly true – but it's also a particularly apt show for this point in my life. At its most basic, LOST features a collection of broken men and women who, by stumbling onto (some might say “careening uncontrollably into”) the island, must confront their flaws – the broken psyche whose repair they’ve ignored amidst the drudgery of everyday life. The island is the place that they go to become better, more complete people. The island is where they might realize more fully their potential.
Manhattan would, of course, be my island (although it’s a bit less tropical than the island on LOST, sadly). Namely, it’s a place to discover a little more clearly who I am, and to use that knowledge to make something of myself, or, barring that, find satisfaction in life. Or die trying (I won’t be giving anything away to say there’s a lot of dying in LOST). When John Locke tells another character that, “everyone gets a new life on this island,” I suppose I was hoping that’s what Manhattan would do for me.
The wonderful thing about setting a show in the fantastical and mythological is that everyone can take something different – something relevant to themselves – away from it. It’s one of the reasons why we still draw upon Greek mythology even though it’s been hundreds, maybe thousands of years since life in the Western world has resembled anything like what Euripides or Sophocles or Yanni (he was a Greek poet, look it up) portrayed.
So here are some things that I took away from LOST:
Find something or someone worth sacrificing for
By “something” I don’t mean “my HDTV”, of course. I mean an ideal or a cause, preferably something that doesn’t do harm (after all, a lot of people were willing to sacrifice in the name of Nazism -- and that didn’t work out too well). That doesn’t mean you necessarily have to sacrifice for it, but the world is full of too many people who care too little for too much. And sometimes I fear that I’m one of those people. As a corollary, finding something or someone to sacrifice for means you implicitly recognize that there is something greater or more worthwhile than yourself.
Not all of life's questions have answers, and that's okay
Not everything on LOST had an explanation, and that drove some people mad. But ambiguity is life. Sometimes things are going to happen for no other reason than that things just happen. Part of growing up -- part of becoming wiser, richer, more complete people – is realizing that sometimes when you ask “why,” “because” can be a perfectly suitable answer. And sometimes it’s the only answer.
Live for the moment, because if you run into a smoke monster, it could be your last
I think this one’s been done to death, the adage that you should live every day as if it’s your last being repeated endlessly. And I don’t really want to live every day as if it’s my last; that would be unnecessarily stressful. But I liked the way Steve Jobs put it in a commencement address at Stanford (which you can view here; it’s an amazingly inspiring speech): “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” Also, avoid smoke monsters whenever possible.
Michael Giacchino should write the score to your life
Oh, what I wouldn’t give to have this musical genius accentuate my life with his grand sounds. I firmly believe that a composer can take a good film and, with a few strokes of a pen and a couple waves of his baton, elevate it to greatness. And Michael Giacchino has achieved just that in scores for LOST, Up, Star Trek, Ratatouille, Mission Impossible III and The Incredibles amongst others. I may or may not have listened to nothing but the soundtrack to Ratatouille for an entire month. His sound can make a bright blue day bluer, a first kiss more electric, a bad day more melancholy, or a strange hatch that you’ve just uncovered in your back yard more mysterious. [Cue falling brass]
The most trying times of your life are the most important times of your life
Locke, Sayid, Jack, Kate and Hurley and all the other characters, faced the imminent threat of death day in and day out while on The Island. Existential crises, whether literal or metaphorical (and let’s hope that for most people, these are just metaphorical) teach you a lot about yourself.
I’ve never confronted death (the closest I came was when, on final approach to SFO, my plane took a short but steep dive, and the pilot explained that it was a problem with the autopilot adding, “the good news is, pilots will never be replaced by computers.”) but I think moving to New York was a similar existential crisis for me. In some ways, death is ultimately a loss of self. And when I moved to New York, the things that I utilized to define my self (friends, family, my home, places I knew, and my history in those places) were, with a few exceptions, all gone. I really only had my idea of “self” to hold onto. And you know what? He and I didn’t know each other as well as I had thought.
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| This may be the greatest food fight to have ever been presented on rearranged silver halide emulsions on a cellulite triacetate base, processed and then projected at 24 frames per second. |
He replies, “Oh no. To live – to live would be an awfully big adventure.”
WOW!!
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