At the Crossroad of An Existential Crisis
The documentary film, ‘Almost There’, that I watched today was released in 2016, the same year I was kind of ‘there’ in the same place as they were. It gave me a lot to think about and has given me a surprisingly uplifted energy to write a blog post about it. I’m not quite sure how it did, but it touched me in the deepest and most powerful way despite it being quite a depressing theme. Here’s the excerpt of the plotline from their website
ALMOST THERE tells the story of three men who embark on a journey in search of meaning and happiness in the autumn of their lives. Bob swaps his safe home for a campervan and tries to find the though guy inside himself in the barren Californian desert. Drag queen and stand-up comedian Steve is fed up of England and makes amends with his past between Benidorm’s concrete towers. And Yamada rediscovers his smile by reading stories to children in Tokyo.
What’s the point of life?
When you’re living your life the way you know how to for years, then suddenly things change and you find your life will never be the same again– this question will make sense to you. You feel that sense of loss, you lose the ability to understand and recognize who or where you are. Places and people around seem distant and alienated, your own face will begin to look like a stranger it’s like you’re not feeling in your own skin.
Liminal space is a cruel place. It’s dark, it’s scary and eerily lonely. It’s the transitional space between point A where you’ve left and point B where you haven’t yet reached. The movie resonates deeply with me for its emotional mayhem watching what these men go through and it reminds me of those dark days I had experienced in the past seven years of my life in one of my biggest and longest liminal spaces.
Fascination but yet heart-warming, it will get you depressed if you are in the same dark age of not knowing where your future lies or if you have any future at all. It asks some hard questions that will make you look back in retrospect on how have you lived your life so far, what exactly are you doing with your precious time right now as you read this, and what’s the meaning behind all of it?
It inspires me to take a look at what I do with my life in comparison to those things I dream to do or achieve but haven’t yet found the way out of my fear to do it. To watch closely as days go by, with the luxury of all the time I still have in the world, but what really do I do about it? So here I am, biting another hard bullet and writing this anyway just so that I will be able to tell myself that I’m glad I’ve done this today.
What about you? Are you satisfied with your life right now? Have you or are you doing everything under your control to live life at your highest potential? Would you be able to look back and can honestly say that you are proud of the person you have become and that this life is absolutely the place that’s meant for you to be in?
This one hour and eighteen minutes might hit you as a depressing ride at first but the film’s positive resolutions and the unexpected yet encouraging breakthrough that they discovered and earned through a hard time will promise you a hopeful, and heartfelt outlook on life no matter at what age, and expect a few drops of joyful tears.
Thank you for spending time with me today. I hope you enjoy reading this and hopefully go see this movie on YouTube.
Until next time, be happy :)
published 2023–03–03
