Groundhog Day and Life

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In church last week, one of the speakers made a rather inarticulate reference to some of his favorite movies. As he did so, I started thinking about mine and why I like them. When I was young, although I didn't care much for the day and since it affects the desert very little now, I really liked Groundhog Day which shows the transformation of a man, Bill Murray, from someone everyone detests into someone who is a blessing to people around him. I suppose I found it inspiring as a younger lad to see an ordinary guy transformed into someone better. I found it synonymous with the beliefs of my Faith that people can change and that when people change for the better it can elevate the world entire. The movie depicts a man who transforms from the natural man who gives into his animal desires into one who avails himself of the opportunity to defy instinct and raise others in the process.

Initially, Bill Murray's character does whatever he likes. He makes mistakes, he luxuriates, and he takes advantage of the situation. He attempts whatever it takes to get into bed with a coworker for whom he has feelings or elevate his career or prove that he's smarter or better or snarkier than other people. He indulges in excess of all kinds and lives it up at every opportunity once he realizes that in the morning there will be zero repercussions if he desires and deigns do evil all his days. Eventually this leads, not to happiness as some might expect, but to DESPERATION, and he tries to kill himself several times only to wake up in the morning and find that he must repeat his life. Most of what he does is selfish, and many of the scenarios play out in a way that he hurts other people and himself as he tries to change something, anything really, and move forward.

Ultimately, the character realizes that this presents an opportunity to improve upon his time. If he's going to be stuck anyway, he can do things that make him a better person, things he always wanted to do but never had the time and money to accomplish. By doing this, he finds that it makes a positive impact on others as he daily ventures forth and lives in a way that makes the world a better place. As time passes, he finds more ways to make sure that he's there to do good in the lives of others and finds he enjoys the positive things that come from being a blessing to his neighbors rather than what he might gain by taking advantage of them. Even better, he doesn't care if they admire him because he knows that in the morning nobody will remember and that he can repeat the feats.

The message for me of Groundhog Day is that only when he makes himself better can he move forward. As long as he was selfish and self-centered, things never got better. Sure, he got what he wanted, but it was always fleeting, and always something he had to repeat the next day, with the ultimate consistent result that nothing endured. Far too many people in this world seek happiness in doing things that cannot and do not lead to it. They rouse themselves from bed every day and live a life of debauchery and selfishness and then opine the fact that they awake in the morning like Bill Murray alone and with nothing to show for their lives and that in some cases they must do a walk of shame back home. Many of these people look at people who live moral lives and mock us, saying nobody ever regretted getting too little sleep or having too much sex, that your worth is how you treat people while they do nothing but injustice to themselves in a vain attempt to slake every lust.

Most of us do not get to repeat the same day and attempt to do things differently. The writers did us a favor to show us that the only way to move forward was to actually become a better person. As Bill Murray found new and more ways in which to bless his fellow men, eventually he reached a place where his dreams came true because he really meant the things that he did in hopes to advance them. He actually became a better man. It wasn't just a show, and that one night when he awoke and things changed finally, he had made the changes stick.

While the movie is not perfect and some things lack a semblance of morality, we need to remember that we aren't perfect either. We do the best we can with what we have, but if we're not really doing the best we can and lying to ourselves in the moment that it is so, we only do others including ourselves a disservice. In the movie, people could tell when Murray didn't mean it, and they caught onto him when he had ulterior motives. In our lives, when we are disingenuous, we're essentially committing spiritual and emotional suicide even if we still live, because we are not being true to anyone.

The days of life, like Groundhog Day, are sometimes dreary and often routine. However, they also present to us an opportunity to decide what kind of person we truly desire to be. Far too many people seem to think that "you only live once, so live it up" promises them a better outcome than "you only live once, so live well", but the latter is the message of this movie. Murray's character only really lives when he rises to his potential and avails himself of opportunities to lift the burden of dreary routine and find a reason to rejoice in the winter of his life. He even finds great bounty on that day that can last into the future, and while that's not always the case, the chance that it might be so provides me with the impetus to go on, straight on, in the course that might make the world a better place like it did for Murray.