me and you and everyone we know

Michael: I just wish I had met her 50 years sooner. But then maybe I needed 70 years of my life to be ready for a woman like Ellen.

The movie “Me and You and Everyone We Know”

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It struck me the moment I heard it.

I remember how my heart skipped a beat. There I was in front of the screen, grabbing a piece of paper just so I could scribble it down - it was something I didn't want to forget.

In a side-storyline within the movie, Michael, a man in his golden years realised that he had finally found his soul mate in an elderly lady called Ellen. But she later turned him down cos she knew that she was dying and the reality of her soon leaving him alone in the world led to the above dialogue.

While the dialogue was used in the said context, I felt a meaning that was worth far beyond that… it was, to me, a universal concept on life.

Imagine someone who has been devoting his life to his career only to learn that a successful career means nothing without the presence of his loved ones. Or someone who has long been pursuing an interest only to discover his talent in something quite different.

These are just random examples. But how many times have we reached a significant point of realisation in our lives, only to wonder why it had never occurred to us earlier? Even with a sense of happiness that comes with enlightenment, it is natural to wish that we hadn’t wasted time in everything else prior to ‘it’.

But had we realise ‘it’ much earlier, would we have cherished ‘it’ with the same level of appreciation?

I guess sometimes we need to be blind for a while… We need to waste some time, maybe even some years, just so that when the right time comes, when ‘it’ unravels in front of us, we wouldn’t miss it for the world.

And when that happens, hopefully, we would pursue it like there’s no tomorrow.