The Music is all Around Us--All you have to do is Listen

I just watched the movie "August Rush" for the first (and second) time tonight. The title of this blog is from the last words spoken by a young musical prodigy in search of his parents. The child uses his musical talent to lure his parents to him as he's been in an orphanage his entire life. Aside from Jonathan Rhys Meyers being beautiful, which by the way was quite distracting, I felt very moved by the entire movie. I had never heard of it before (I may have been in a hermit writing phase or something) but I just got The Movie Networks on cable and it happened to be on. I watched the last half of it and then watched the movie again.

At the end, his parents unknowningly come together to watch him conduct a Central Park symphony he composes. His parents had been the victims of fate, untrustworthy jade. His father never knew of his existence and his mother thought her child dead. The mother finds out her child is alive and does everything to find him. The father never stopped thinking about the mother - their one night of passion together ten or eleven years earlier.

I'm not a movie critic by any stretch of the imagination, but this film stopped me in my tracks. A journey of a little boy towards something he yearns for and can feel so strongly that he runs away from the orphanage to The Big Apple. He walks to the beat of a different drummer - the drummers are his parents, unknowingly calling to him through their own musical talents. He knows they are out there. And he calls back - through his own music. He hears music in everything - the trees, traffic, basketball - you name it, it is music to him.

I have to admit it. There are two distinct things I'm a sucker for - inspiring musical composition, classical or modern, which never fails to raise the fine hairs on my neck and arms and a happy ending. So shoot me - I'm a romance novelist. I sat there shivering as I watched the movie.

I just checked and this movie was nominated for several awards, including an Academy Award. Wow - I really must have been hiding in a hole when this was released!  I didn't know it was nominated when I watched it. But the idea that a little boy's perception of reality was so concrete, something he could actually hear, was wonderful. His perception successfully drove this fairy tale/journey/love story. Perception is reality. I wrote about that in another post.  I think therefore I am. I ask and I am given.

While the movie is obviously fictional and highly unlikely to ever happen in reality, it does hold lessons. Unfortunately, most of those lessons are cliches but cliches are cliches because there is a grain of truth in them. Your hopes and dreams are your aspirations. You generally aren't given or conceived of a dream without some way of making it real. You may fail. Many, many times. You may fall. Many more times. But what matters is that you pick yourself up and try again. Within reason. I mean, Stephen Hawking is not likely to physically climb Mount Everest, but what he can do with his mind is more impressive. He has climbed a Mount Everest in his mind. But if he wanted to be at the top of Mount Everest, I would suppose a helicopter could get him there (I'm assuming there isn't a problem with thin air that would prevent an engine from running properly).

The point being that your dreams can be reality. The reality, the path, the experience may be different than imagined, but the dream is still fulfilled. "The music is all around us - all you have to do is listen." The music, in this case, is a dream you choose to listen to and to follow to your reality. Whatever perception of reality that is.