Rewind

One of my favorite  movies as a child was  the original version of The Parent Trap. My sisters, cousins and I would play the VHS tape over and over again until we eventually memorized the movie. The glitch was, the movie was taped in the latter part of a long recording that actually began with the last part of a tv miniseries called The Last Days of Pompeii. So, to rewind it to the beginning of The Parent Trap (and anybody who has ever grown up with the VHS and the Beta tapes would know what this means), often meant overshooting the video and having to sit through a few minutes or so of the end of the first movie. So that last part of The Last Days of Pompeii was as familiar to me as the dearly loved Parent Trap.

It was hardly a movie that young children would appreciate. It’s a fictional recounting of the last few months of an ancient Roman town called Pompeii and what happened to its citizens after a huge eruption of nearby Mt. Vesuvius. As I grew older, I started to rewind the film nearer and nearer to the beginning as I got more and more curious about the drama of it all. Unfortunately, the series was more than five hours long and the VHS tape only recorded about the last hour and a half or so. Eventually I gave up.

That is, until a few days ago. For some strange reason or other, I thought about the series and decided that it was about time I finally saw all of it. So I googled it, found it on IMDB (there was more than one version) and found someone who uploaded the whole thing on YouTube. (You gotta love technology!)It had about 750 views. (Apparently, I’m not as strange as I thought I was.)

And as I sat there and stared at the computer for about 5 hours or so, I finally began to understand the whole story. It was an Ancient Roman soap opera complete with unredeemable villains, unrelenting social climbers, complicated love triangles, unrequited love, political intrigue, spectacular effects (as spectacular as it could get in the 80s) with a solid Christian message on hope, faith and neighborly love, to boot. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I finally understood the drama of it all, the little nuances of the scenes that I took for granted, the underlying motives of the characters and their tragic end and the meaningful dialogue that I barely grasped as a child. I even found out, after researching on the actors, that my favorite performance of the series was delivered by a much older Sir Laurence Olivier himself. No wonder he was so good!

This series got me thinking (and this is a pretty strange metaphor)… that meeting people is a lot like watching The Last Days of Pompeii.

The older I get, the fewer my chances become of meeting people at the beginning of their stories. Apart from a few childhood friends, most people I deal with, are already in the middle of their lives. I don’t have the luxury of knowing their “once upon a time.” I am smack in the middle of their chapter 20s and 30s. Unfortunately, I forget this fact and if they do something I do not particularly agree with or like, I am ready to label them and put them in a box and move on to the next person. I react to them as though I knew everything they were about. It’s like passing judgment on a movie I never even bothered to start or never took the time to finish.

But experience has taught me that if I open my mind and my heart a little and make an effort to learn about other people’s stories, I can treat them with more respect and react to them with more understanding. If I am a little more patient in listening to their stories and take a little more time to “rewind” to the beginning, I learn to appreciate them better. I learn to value the nuances of their character, the worth of their experiences, the drama of their lives and the uniqueness of their spirit, and to understand that their stories are far from over.

Nobody I know is a finished story, not if they’re still on this earth. We are all works in progress and each of us has a story to tell and a story yet to be played out. Some people’s stories take a long time to uncover. But I’ve found that the wait has always been worth it, that people are generally nobler than we give them credit for and their stories are always as precious as our own.