Welcome home, Mr. Cobb

Yeah, Inception is definitely one of my favorite movies. I just finished watching it for maybe the ninth or tenth time, who knows at this point, and every time I watch it, I learn something new.

This time around, it was a number of little things - the attention given to time between dream levels, for example. The turn of the van signifying a change in the gravity of the hotel level, and an intentional amount of attention given to that turn of the van.

As much as reality is taken into question with the spinning of the top, Mal offers an interesting possibility that the police and corporations chasing Cobb around (in the real-life level) are just projections attacking the dreamer.

This is one of those movies where you can't just Google a simple answer - you'll have to make the decision for yourself, which I think is one of the fascinating aspects of this movie.

Speaking of totems, consider Cobb's (which is actually Mal's). A spinning top that does one of two things - continues to spin if Cobb is in a dream, or falls down if he is in his reality. An object representing binary truth, not unlike the coin that Harvey Dent uses in The Dark Knight. The difference here is that Cobb uses the totem to guide his interpretation of his world - Dent uses his coin to continue living in his.

I searched for all the posts I've written about Inception, and a couple have been about the movie directly, and some have simply mentioned the movie. One of those mentions is in a running diary of The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place, which I've always seemed to do in the final week of August - previously coinciding with the start of another school year at Stonehill. Interestingly enough, it's almost the last week of August...

This is all we get

So I just read an article on Arian Foster, Houston Texans running back, and his lack of faith. It's interesting that in those three words, lack of faith, all of these preconceived notions come into play. And you might have absolutely no idea who Arian Foster is. It's an important article, and one worth reading. Here's a link to it.

I'm a big fan of the idea that this is all we get, this life. To me, the question of anything existing after us, or anything having existed before us, doesn't matter. It's a conversation I'm willing to have with anyone, because I love hearing about others' beliefs on these sorts of things, but to me, that conversation isn't going to change how I live my life, or how you live yours. To pull a line from one of my favorite episodes of House, "Three Stories," "I find it more comforting to believe that this simply isn't a test."

There's a video with some great scenes from House that deals with religion, but it seems to have been deleted since I last watched it. So, here's a consolation video. House is an atheist, if you didn't know, and for the record, I'm listening to a band called This Will Destroy You, the members of which are anti-theist. It's just interesting, all of these facts. This is all we get.

Space between the spaces

All I found, space between the spaces
Standing in the nothing, and time reclaims you
- Foo Fighters, "Outside"

Okay, so I doubt Dave Grohl was talking about being mindful and having awareness of breath when he was writing the lyrics to "Outside," but that was what I immediately went to after reading about spaces in mindfulness meditation. Really fascinating stuff, for anyone who has been in athletics, or enjoys having total awareness of their surroundings.

There are key spaces in life, these instantaneous moments in which we have a set of possible outcomes. The space between stimulus and response - response being the key word, because if you're not aware of the space, it becomes a reaction. There's an important difference between reacting and responding - the latter makes aware that space and is a thought-out, executed decision, instead of a knee-jerk reaction to a stimulus.

Another cool one is the space between inhaling and exhaling. For me, it's almost like a second inhale or second exhale, as though your true breath is catching up to the involuntary breathing. Again, another fraction of a second.

Think about these spaces - be aware of them, pay attention to them, live into them.