The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. And Me.

We went to see The Secret Life of Walter Mitty last weekend, billed as a comedy, but which left me gobsmacked. The film's message, if you want to call it that, has been rolling around my brain all week long, and I need to write it down in order to make sense of it.

I hadn't heard a lot about the movie prior to seeing it, but my daughter said she'd heard it was funny, plus I like Ben Stiller, so whatever. The film started out a little 'campy' and I thought eh, not my thing, but very quickly, as the story began unfolding and the tone shifting, I found myself caught up inside Walter Mitty's head.

It looks an awful lot like the inside of my own head.
He's fiction by the way.

In a nutshell, Walter Mitty has these big dreams and sees himself living a brave life filled with all sorts of experiences. In the real world he works a 9-5 office job in the basement of Life Magazine.  I don't want to give away the whole movie, but suffice it to say, one thing leads to another and he finds just enough courage and inspiration to take a first step, which leads to a second, and before you know it he is becoming the person he imagined himself to be.

I want that.

Before we moved overseas I didn't do a lot of traveling or 'out of my comfort' zone stuff. Don't get me wrong, I loved my life. I absolutely adored mothering daughters, and found the paid work I was doing supremely satisfying. But then we moved. Life shifted. And in the process, I shifted.  Living in another country opened up a whole world of opportunity I vaguely knew was out there, but didn't think a whole lot about because I was living my happy comfortable life. Nothing wrong with that, but once the lid on a box has been lifted it's hard to cram it back down.

When you're living an ocean away from what you've always known, and you're traveling a lot, experiencing new things on an almost daily basis, interacting with all sorts of people, pushing yourself to do things that are outside the realm of what you ever thought you'd be comfortable or capable of doing, it changes you.  And one of the ways it changed me was it made me a little bit brave.

I've always been what we call in our family 'fraidy scared' of so many things in life. Not just stuff that might fall under the category of adventure, but also things like dealing with uncomfortable situations, speaking up, anything that might be dubbed remotely confrontational.

I've never been a person who dives head first in to new things. I've always been thoughtful, and I like to consider all the possible 'what might go wrong' scenarios in my head, before gingerly putting my big toe in the water. My husband learned early on in our married life that when something takes me out of my comfort zone, I'm gonna be needing a pep talk. Even then it's likely I'll still have to be grabbed by the hand and pulled along much of the time. Or pushed, depending on what we're talking about.

I've always been a confident person in terms of what I believe, my ability to parent, my work, etc but in terms of stepping outside those areas? Not so much. Six years in another country though, built my confidence, made me not only less fearful of new, but actually found me loving it.

Insert a shift back to this side of the pond. A few years go by, and here I am, back in my comfort zone, living life with the familiar, and I think I've forgotten how to be brave. Forgotten that I am brave.  

As I watched the movie I kept thinking about how God works in mysterious ways. It was only a day or two earlier I'd written here about my word for this year. How it was a word that chose me, and in all honesty I was still sort of questioning the wisdom of choosing that particular word.  As I sat in that theatre it felt like my word was everywhere.  Unafraid.  That word, my word, was woven through the film in a way I couldn't miss. It might as well have been painted across the screen.

We're less than two weeks into 2014, but I've already been out of my comfort zone in dealing with some things I've committed to this year.  Then there's this-hubs and I will celebrate 30 years of marriage in June. We know we want to take a trip somewhere, but haven't been able to pin down the destination, mostly because he wants exotic and I want safe. He wants far and I want familiar.  He wants large and I want comfortable.

As soon as the movie ended I looked at hubs and said "I can do exotic...far...large."
Thanks Walter Mitty for the inspiration.

Most of all, I'm thankful for a Heavenly Father who knows me better than I know myself. Who wants more for me than I can ask or imagine. Who puts people and opportunity and situations in my path, and courage and conviction in my heart.

Who created a big-small, wide, wonderful, sometimes scary world, and wants me out there in it. Who walks beside the fearful and says be brave.