create your own best moments!

So I watched 17 Again on DVD and I'm tellin' you, Zac Efron is just too good to be true here! I'm not a big fan of him but yes, he's H-O-T, enough said! Plus he proves that he's real actor here, a huge difference from his kinda-cheesy role in High School Musical (just an opinion, sorry for the HSM fans ;p). He's just, WOW, haha ok I'll stop before become too hyperbolic.

Anyway, that's not really the point (still, Zac Efron, WOW). I love movies with real life lesson, and this movie emphasized a problem which I think many people are facing: living in the past. For you comedy-romance buffs who haven't watched it and hate spoilers, I don't recommend you to read this post. So, go see for yourselves first then come back and we'll discuss about it! Oh yeah, this post was supposed to be published yesterday, but something wrong happened and then BAM! The draft's gone. Dammit. I have to start writing all over again, fine.

I'm not good at creating sentences like the ones you'll read on those self-help books. But I totally agree with the message the movie has brought and would like to share this from my point of view. Here's a dialogue between the older Mike (played by Matthew Perry) and the mysterious old janitor while Mike was looking at his old basketball team picture at his school corridor, the one with him as the team captain:

"Mike O'Donnell, high school star, never quite lived up to your potential. Sooner or later you'll all come back to the old school. Stand there and look at the picture of the glory days, wondering ‘what might have been’. Seems to me you guys are living in the past”, the janitor said.
“Well, of course I want to live in the past. It was better there”, Mike replied.

And here’s what Scarlet, Mike’s about-to-divorce wife, said when they argued about Scarlet’s plan to turn their yard into her landscape design showpiece:

“So I spent the last 18 years of my life listening to you whine about all the things you could’ve done without me and I have no right?”

Living in the past, praising the old glory days, longing to have them again, or maybe wished that you took a different path so your life would be much better than what you’re facing right now. “I’m extremely disappointed with my life”, Mike told Scarlet.

Later, at the court, full of regret to himself, Mike told her, “I grew up, I lost my way, and I blamed you for my failures”. At the end of the movie, he said to her, “You’re the best decision I ever made, I just forgot”. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, what a classic.

Okay, first of all, I’m just a late adolescent trying not to be idle in her free-exam days and clearly not an expert in this matter. But I do have my own thoughts. I think people are living in the past for one of two classic reasons. One, extreme dissatisfaction with the present life, or two, regret something in the past and not having the volition to move on. Mike O’Donnell is both. He thinks his life is a total mess: in the middle of a divorce process, not being a good dad, his job isn’t making any progress. He used to be the it-guy in high school but then his life doesn’t turn out to be quite what he wanted, and he blamed the choices he made in his teenage life.

I think I’ve been in both. Disappointed with my choice, feel like I’m about to mess up everything. I don’t know whether this is my fault or anyone’s fault, I don’t even know if it’s something false. I looked back and wondered what would have happened if I had took the other path back then. Pissed off, I blamed everything I could. Then I remember my mom’s words when she asked me to take the acceleration program in high school, “What are you afraid of? Be brave. Take chances. There’s always something good in there and you’ll never know what God wants to show to you”. There’s always something He wants to show to me, always a reason behind something, all the time. So I pulled myself together, figured out what’s wrong, planned my next step, smile, and moved on. And hey, those times turned out to be one of the best moments of my life :)

Well, this is a movie, and Mike is young once again. This gives him a chance to get to know more about his children and wife from the new perspective, which opens his eyes and make him realize what he’s been missing for the last 20 years of his life as the consequences of praising his past too much. That all this time, he had a great life which he never appreciated. But this world is not a movie, isn’t it? And there’s no rewind button in our life console. So how do we get our second chance? Maybe God wouldn’t give it to us if we didn’t seek for it first. Maybe the best thing we can do is accept it, be grateful with our present, then figure out what can be fixed, plan the next move, and do it. It’s not easy, for anyone, but life’s a bitch anyway, and we’re here to conquer it.

This is my all-time favorite 17 Again quote. It’s not in the movie, it’s actually the last line on the resume, the one that attracts me to buy the DVD at the first time. I’m so in love with this quote that I used it right away as my facebook status.

“The best year of your life is the one you’re living right now”

Beautiful, isn’t it? I can’t agree more with this. Be grateful. Move on. Believe that God always have something to show to you in each phase of your life. Your entire life may not always filled with glory days, because shit happens, and that’s the part of it, but each phase of your life will always have their own beautiful moments if you decide to create them. That’s really something.

Whether to live and fall deeply in our irreversible past, or to move on and create more beautiful memories so one day we can recall them as one of the best moments in our life, the choice is ours.

Once again, just wanna share my opinion. Perhaps the paragraph content are completely not well-structured, not to mention written with a lame English, my bad. Well, still learning, can’t help it. And I would love to hear from you as well, if you don’t mind, I love this kind of talks.

Have fun with creating your own best moments, and happy holiday all! :D

P.S.: I do not own the images in this post