When I was a lot younger and more naive and innocent about the world, Hollywood used to surprise me with the depth to which it could entertain and shock. Horror movies would scare me like nothing else, and fiction/sci-fi/fantasy would excite. Reality, somehow, seemed much duller.
As I have grown older, I am continuing to discover that real life holds far greater extremes of horror and joy than any movie ever could.
Sadly and happily, after almost 50 years, I have learned and am continuing to learn that a true evil of a kind that no movie can reproduce, and true joy of the type that also can’t be replicated, exists in real life.
I don’t just mean this on a global, regional, and national level. On a personal level, I see things in people in this world that shock me to the core like ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ or ‘Psycho’ can’t come close to, and yet I get to meet real people who, in my day-to-day life, are braver, stronger, better, and kinder than the greatest superhero.
Life is so completely full of extremes in both directions, and the more I see one side, I also see the other. Maybe I lived in a bubble my entire life, but recent years—potentially because of or coincidentally alongside Parkinson’s—have shown me both sides of life. The two sides, however, are so completely different.
The evil is seemingly made up of things I can’t really understand. It is personified by a disease whose cause is not known, whose cure is elusive, which behaves unpredictably, appears out of nowhere, and yet is always there. Its evil is partly the inability to understand its actions and the way it goes about business. This is sadly true of the worst of people—they behave on a level and do things that I simply can’t even begin to start fathoming. This, I suppose, is the essence of the horror movie—the surprise element. In real life, it seems so much darker.
It may also be that the day-to-day reality of having an insidious disease like Parkinson’s means that the things that used to scare and frighten me—pain, fear, sadness, embarrassment—are so commonplace and part of my being that I am numb to them. They no longer really register on my scale.
The beauty and good are completely different from my perspective. It is often in the simplest of things. A smile, a hug, a kind action, a laugh, a clever idea, a good person, a great cup of coffee. I know this is going to sound crazy, but we recently had a family dinner where my daughter set the whole table—young and old—the question: how do you make 25 using (one time only) the numbers 2+4+6+8? Suddenly the room went serious, and unbelievably, I got it first. I seriously jumped for joy, and we laughed so hard about how the guy with the incurable brain disease got it right first. For me, the beauty and good are not in the complex and tough things; it is in the very simple things of life.
Seeing my kids do something better than I could ever have done and being better than me is now far more rewarding than driving a Ferrari, although I have to admit that that experience in Italy was unforgettable and a lot of fun, although that was also really partly seeing the joy on my kids faces.
That is the good news as far as I am concerned—the good things in life are often so close, so near, and so relatively simple to experience, and so often come out of everyday things.
When I was younger, I guess it took a lot more adrenaline to make the good things happen for me, and I was much more naive about the existence of bad things—the extremes. In those days, it was certainly not the case that ‘Reality—darker than horror, richer than fiction’—quite the opposite. I suppose that this is why I find it so hard to get excited by Hollywood movies now. For good and bad, real life is so much more extreme in both ways.
I don’t have any idea what it will be like as life and this terrible disease progress—maybe middle age is the height of this feeling, and the world will narrow. Alternatively, the panorama and extremes will continue to expand—I have no idea.
As a person of faith, I have grown up with a notion of good and bad and the basic fact that people and society have the free will to choose either. I never saw or understood the depth to which individuals and societies could plummet like I see it today, but on the good side, I never saw like I do now the amount of good and beauty in the more simple things in life.
The glass-half-full side of me will take the positives from this. Sometimes, however, the other side of me is simply shocked to the core at the other side.
On a completely selfish level, I pray from the bottom of my heart and the depths of my soul that my kids and the kids of my family and friends stay firmly on the side they very clearly are on at this moment in time. I hope for all of us that the evil I have sadly seen in reality vanishes and that things on the negative side get less vivid but the positives remain richer and become even more so.
