This Thing Called Life

"I'm nobody, who are you?
Are you nobody too?
Then there's a pair of us, don't tell!
They'll banish us, you know. 

How dreary to be somebody!
How public like a frog
To tell one's name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!"
 - by Emily Dickenson

 I was playing a word game with my mom and sisters. My youngest sister arranged her tiles to say 'mars' and asked if that was okay. I thought it was fine.
"It's a proper noun ..." my Mom said.
"'Life On Mars'", I quipped.
The game carried on.
 
 "Life On Mars" was a short-lived television show. I saw a few episodes of the US version, which was adapted from BBC, whose title comes from a David Bowie song. It already sounds confusing, right? The plot centered around a police detective who awakes from a car accident to find himself in the seventies: over thirty years in the past. Though incredibly confused, he must try to fit into a groove of what is now his everyday life, solving crimes with new partners and trying desperately to discover if he is in a coma, dreaming up this new life, or has gone crazy, or has in fact somehow been transported to the past. His knowledge of certain global events which will take place in the next thirty years influences his life and actions. He is torn between the time he knew and wants to get back to, while being intrigued with this life in the past, and how he might fit in with it all.

 The US version had to take a hiatus which lowered viewing. The show ended after one season, and in fact I only saw the first few episodes before the hiatus. It was intriguing though. I started thinking about the premise of the show while playing the word game. It reminded me of another show which involved a detective waking from a car accident to find himself in a new reality: "Awake". In that show, the detective has two realities: one in which he awakes and his wife died in the car accident, one in which it was his son who died. Every time he goes to sleep, he instantly wakes up in the other reality. He not only has a different detective partner in each one, he has a different psychologist which he goes to see, each one firmly telling him that the other reality is a dream. "It's your subconscious trying to deal with the emotional trauma," they each tell him. He doesn't know what to believe, what is real, especially when he finds that things in one reality give him clues to solve crimes and mysteries in the other. They are subtly linked. So he simply has to go from wakefulness to wakefulness with just his wife, with just his son, and with questions about why the accident happened in the first place.

 I enjoy shows and films that make you think. You know how each person has a desire to be known and accepted, which can be paradoxical because sometimes in order to be accepted, people deny parts of who they really are? It's something that doesn't really make sense, like waking up in a different reality. Some change is good and healthy. Other times though, one might try to change for the sake of 'fitting in', only to keep looking over their shoulder at who they were, who they really are.

  Sometimes I deeply long to be able to know how other people view the world. To not just walk in their shoes but experience their thoughts and feelings. Some things strike me as so beautiful and poignant and I just want to know if anyone really experiences those same perceptions, and if not, what things reverberate the cores of others' beings in a similar way? For the most part, life gets so busy that it just presses forward day to day. Though sometimes, I stop and have the feeling that we are all walking around with a question in our heads: does anyone know how life all connects? Does anyone know if I'm awake or dreaming?


When I was seven, I had a moment that I'll never forget. I was sitting in the back seat of my parent's car, gazing out the window, when I realized the truth of what a gift it is to be alive. I can't really describe it. I was suddenly stuck by the fact that I was living and breathing in that moment, with a life full of possibilities ahead of me. My seven-year-old brain was awash with facts: I could have never been born, I could have died as an infant, I could have been given a mind which was unable to fathom thoughts of life and death and purpose. Instead, I was there, alive. For whatever reason, on that ordinary day, I was thankful to be alive.

I bring up that moment because I wanted so badly to share it. Sometimes words can't adequately describe a personal revelation, especially at age seven. What if everyone could laugh and weep together and really understand everyone else and never think anyone was weird or crazy?  Of would that be as unbalanced as if someone said, "I'm from the future."

In "Life On Mars" and "Awake", each of the main characters has to hold on to the truths they've always known - who they are, what they do, who they love - while grappling with new evidence which is presenting itself as truth. Although we may not ever wake up to a new reality or time, I believe that every person is walking a balance of what is true in life. What it really means to be an individual and to fit in, what to believe about God and about life after death, and how to meet other people on their level and be met in return.  In this way, perhaps it's like we're all going about as though we just woke up in another time: certain of some things, in need of faith for others. I'm certain that I'm alive and awake. I have faith that there's a reason; that it's more than just a dream.