Second chances

‘The Shawshank Redemption’ is a movie that I had the opportunity to watch many times but that I managed to actually watch only last week. I know it sounds unbelievable that I would miss out on a movie like this especially when it came on TV countless times but maybe the time wasn’t right. So Mahi and I sat down together or rather I lay down and she sat in the sofa close by and we watched it. She had already watched it and decided to record it when I mentioned that I had not. She was eating snacks, sipping her lime tea and stealing looks at my expressions as I watched the story unfold.

Needless to say, I loved the movie. Who wouldn’t? It is the ending one would have wished for the Count of Monte Cristo. It is the sort of revenge that is not based on hatred and in that sense it resembled Tolstoy’s story ‘God sees the truth, but waits’ more than Dumas’s. You see on the screen an entire macrocosm of human foibles and virtues in a compressed time frame. The story of Andy is so well told that we forget that he isn’t real. We forget that he is a wisp of someone’s imagination. We forget that there is a distance between Andy in prison and us over here, watching.

Mahi, my 15-year-old, loved it to bits. And I, 45 years old, loved it to bits too. For different reasons perhaps. She loved the story. I loved its compassion. It is steeped in human kindness even among all the instances of greed, selfishness and cruelty. It shows us how it is not incarceration that is a man’s worst fear, it is loneliness. A man who has been institutionalised for so long, penned in and regulated, cannot be on his own in a world that doesn’t forgive or believe in second chances. And that is perhaps the message I took from the movie – the power and the blessing of a second chance in life.

Too often we believe our lives must go through paths that are already existent. We are born, we go to school, we take pains to follow rules, we study some more, we get married, we have babies, we think if we are financially successful we have made it but more often than not we get bored. Sometimes we don’t get the great jobs and that makes us feel even worse. Sometimes life throws us curveballs like a failed marriage, an accident that changes our status to dependent, terminal disease – anything that isn’t part of the above plan. And we have to find the resources to deal with it.

That’s where we give ourselves that second chance. The chance to conquer situations that we find daunting. The chance to forgive mistakes that we made for whatever reason. The chance to value ourselves or believe in ourselves. And therein lies our true redemption.