Think Happy Thoughts!

It’s amazing sometimes how the smallest of moments in your young life, can manufacture the biggest of bearings upon your heart. How the simplest of actions and words you encounter find themselves altering their form. Morphing from normal concepts into the otherworldly; into our ever-present tools of life. Some of those tools aim to facilitate our well-being, while others act as devices resulting in our more terrifying tendencies and behaviors. But the ones I love the most are those enduring thoughts that end up shaping so much of what you strive to become. And yet you don’t even realize their precise impact until later on in life.

I decided to reminisce a couple days ago, and I found myself watching the movie Hook after not seeing the film for years and years now. And to my surprise, my experience this time around was much more touching and inspirational. I feel for the first time like I was truly able to appreciate and take in the entirety of what the motion picture has truly meant for me all this time. I realize now that an ambition I’ve held on to for most of my life wasn’t originally my own, (hardly anything is these days), but it was rather instilled through this “ordinary” movie ― which by the way is ordinary in no way to me.

Looking back, I now recognize that the first of my lofty aspirations for fatherhood started when I first discovered SPOILER ALERT ― Peter Pan’s happy thought was to be a daddy ― SPOILER END. It was like “lightning had just struck my brain”. It had never donned on me that my zeal for parenthood had been initially conceived from the pure joy and elation of Hook, rather than different aspects and dynamics of my family and surroundings. But the feeling was clear. It was that same sensation that continues to make me feel like being a good father, no a great one, is the ultimate adventure; the ultimate challenge for any man. I knew of course that there are many parents in this world. But for that first time, fatherhood became less of a subtlety, and rather something more ethereal; something worth being well thought-out. A good friend told me recently that a lot of times we recognize the journeys and conclusions to our own stories; even well before they come to pass. When I was 8, 10, and 12, it didn’t seem like the movie had much impact on my life ―aside from some really good jokes and imagination fodder. ― But with the benefit of hindsight, I suppose I’m just getting a better glimpse of how God’s marvelous plan continues to illustrate itself.