Hope and Love

“There comes a time in your life, when you walk away from all the drama and people who create it. You surround yourself with people who make you laugh. Forget the bad and focus on the good. Love the people who treat you right, pray for the ones who do not. Life is too short to be anything but happy. Falling down is a part of life, getting back up is living.” ~ José N. Harris

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

You might think I’m going to join the chorus of people commenting on the situation with the virus, but I’m not. Okay, not entirely.

I make connections between things that seem to be totally unrelated. This morning as I was thinking what to write for this week’s post, the movie we watched last night kept running through my head. It’s a survival/love story and aren’t we in the middle of that kind of situation right now?

The movie is The Mountain Between Us with the wonderful Kate Winslet and Idris Elba in the lead roles. I recorded it a few weeks ago on a whim. I’d never heard of it before, but I thought, “Hey, we can’t go wrong with Kate Winslet and Idris Elba at the heart of the story.” If you don’t know the movie, I suggest you rent it.

Alex, played by Kate is trying to get to her wedding, but her flight to Denver has been cancelled because of an impending storm. Ben, played by Idris, is a surgeon trying to get to an important surgery, but is in the same boat. They happen to be going in the same direction. Alex suggests they charter a plane. The pilot, Walter, played by Beau Bridges, has a small two seater. This makes Alex and Ben nervous, but they are hell bent on getting to their destinations as quickly as possible so they charter the plane. While over the mountains, Walter suffers a massive stroke and they crash. It’s January! Walter dies, and they are both injured, Alex the most severely with a broken leg. They are faced with the problem of how to survive the mountains in winter. They only have each other, a small amount of survival gear and Walter’s dog. It takes them weeks to get down to the valley floor to find help.

Near the end of the movie I said to Barry, “How do you come back to your life after an experience like that?” To which he replied, “I don’t know. Maybe you can’t.” That’s so true. Adversity of any kind alters us. It changes our trajectory. We have to navigate the world in a new way.

That’s what happens to Ben and Alex. She couldn’t marry her fiancé when she gets back. She’s forever bound to Ben. He’s altered too, but thinks that Alex has gone through with her wedding. So, he goes back to London to practice a different kind of medicine, one that requires him to be more involved with his patients. After many calls to Ben, Alex sends him the photographs she took during their survival journey. I forgot to mention that she’s a photojournalist. When he gets the photos, he sets up a meeting in New York where she lives. Their meeting is awkward at first. But when he finds out that she didn’t get married, we see hope in his eyes. Alex thinks they’ve missed their chance, but she tells Ben she thinks it was love that helped them survive. Outside the restaurant, they part. Alex going one direction, Ben the other. But their connection to each other is so strong, they turn around and run back into each other’s arms.

So, even though what we’re going through right now isn’t a movie with a completely happy ending, change is going to happen whether we like it or not. I know from personal experience that giving into fear and fighting to keep things the same only makes life more difficult. I have hope that we won’t do that. That we’ll navigate through these rough times and come through the better for it.

I’m sending love and prayers to all of you, to all of us. I hope you are well, or getting well.

Lucinda Sage-Midgorden © 2020

Lucinda is the author of The Space Between Time, an award finalist in the “Fiction: Fantasy” category of the 2017 Best Book Awards. It’s a little bit like Outlander in that it’s a historical, time-travel, magical realism, novel. Jenna’s life is shattered and she must put her life back together. When she finds old journals as she’s clearing out her mother’s house, she joins consciousness with her three-times great-grandmother, Morgan. She is able to come back to her own life at intervals and apply what she’s learned to heal and forgive.

The Space Between Time is available in all ebook formats at Smashwords and for Kindle at Amazon, or you can find the ebook at iBooks or Barnes and Noble. If you prefer a physical copy, you can find a print-on-demand version at Amazon. Stay tuned for news when the audiobook version is published.