Lessons of THE HOURS

Adapting a beautifully evocative, deep, and wise novel to film isn't easy. Those who succeed usually figure out somehow to stay true to the original concept while at the same time using the visual possibilities of cinema to advantage and telescoping scenes, bringing out their essence while respecting a film viewer's attention span. It isn't easy.

Last night I saw THE HOURS for the second time. The first time I saw it, when it came out in the early 2000s, I felt something deeply but wasn't sure what it was. This time, it was clearer.

Perhaps on first viewing the meaning eluded me because I was stuck in my own ideas about what Ultimate Truth is: that there would be a realization that we are outside of time, of "The Hours." But here were the creators of this film – the screenwriter and director along with Michael Cunningham, the book's author, trying to say something new to me. This time, I listened:

Everyone has a life's trajectory – and we experience life to the fullest when we let go and live it, whatever it may be. It may be we are destined to live a "happy" life. Or it may be we are destined to die young, or to abandon our children. We are not in control. And when we come to know that, we are free. We also come to know compassion, both for ourselves and others, because we understand that it's not a matter of choice.

It happened that I saw another film the night before that tangentially speaks to the same truth: CRAZY WISDOM, a biography of Chogyam Trungpa, the Tibetan Buddhist teacher who died early from complications of alcoholism. He and Suzuki Roshi, of the SF Zen Center, were friends, and, in a biography of Suzuki I once read, the Roshi reportedly said that he was concerned that Trungpa, who was decades younger, would predecease him, cutting short all the work he was doing to establish Buddhism in American. Trungpa was said to reply that alcohol abuse was his karma and he wasn't going to interfere with it.

I'm sure lots of people who have overcome alcoholism and other kinds of addiction would disagree, but Trungpa's way of living, without resistance to whatever was happening to him in the present, gave him a power that most of us lack. He didn't waste energy asking the question, “How shall I live?” He just lived, without concern for consequences.

Of course, some will say that Trungpa was foolish, and that he hurt people by his actions. Others might say that an enlightened being might live like that, but ordinary people would cause chaos if they tried. But a third possibility is that we are not, in any case, in control of our destiny; we only think we are. We create a narrative that gives our ego the comfort of an illusory unified self when really it is all just happening; then, when life goes in a direction our narrative doesn't call for, we suffer.

In any case, this viewing of the film of THE HOURS was transformative for me. Being one with the life I am living, not needing it to be something I imagine to be more complete – that is the secret of happiness.