“I’m just afraid that if I died today, my life would have amounted to nothing.”
If there’s one movie last year that captured my spiritual crisis of adulthood so far, it was Soul. I say this knowing full well that Soul is an animated feature, Pixar’s latest—a kid’s movie. And yet, no other film in 2020 mirrored me as deeply as this tale of a jazz pianist who rediscovers life in the present tense.
Joe Gardner insists he was born to play music. The movie doesn’t disagree with him, per se, but shows how wrong he is about being born to do only one thing in his life. It’s crucial to his well-being that he sees otherwise.
I have been Joe for as long as I can remember. I’m no pianist, but I know how to write. If you were to ask me, I’d call it my spark, the one thing I’m capable of doing. Everything else I’ve flubbed: cashiering, selling, making lattes, carrying plates, loading and unloading, answering phones, relaying messages. Writing is the only thing that flows naturally. I write better than I speak.
I tried to make a career out of writing fiction, drafting scripts, pitching essays and articles—which is to say I haven’t been successful. I routinely had to take up part-time work to support my long-running dream. I’d get there soon enough, I reasoned. I just have to keep going.
Early on, Joe is offered a full-time position as a middle school band teacher – a promotion that would be euphoric to anyone. Benefits, a steady paycheck, the security and affirmation of being a faculty member. But for Joe, the news lands with a thud. It’s the opposite of a dream coming true and more like something winding down. When the opportunity comes up to play with famed jazz musician Dorothea Williams, Joe darts across town like there’s no tomorrow. It’s what he’s been waiting for and he’s never felt more alive. And then he ends up in a coma.
Joe finds himself as a soul heading towards The Great Beyond. But his life can’t be over, not now. “I’m due. Heck, I’m overdue,” Joe says, running in the other direction. Back to his body on Earth and to a life that was finally coming together.
Before the pandemic, my dream came true, if only for a moment. I landed THE writing job that I never thought would come. I had given up twice prior, changing careers both times. All the odd jobs I worked in between made me unhappier because I wasn’t writing. I took a chance on a dream opportunity and it was like the world had finally heard me. I broke my back freelancing for 4 years. Now, it was my time. It was as if the stars and the planets had aligned, paving the way for this one moment.
Then the pandemic happened. My employment was put on hold. Three weeks later, the position was no longer available.
All I’ve known post-college was the chase, the grind, the hustle, so the stillness brought on by the pandemic felt like utter freefall. The news left me shrunken, beaten. I wept at my desk, the same desk I had bought 4 years ago as a gift to myself – a promise that I’d buy an even bigger desk when the time came. Looking back on my life, I felt like I had accomplished nothing — only failure.
“You can’t eat dreams for breakfast,” Joe’s mother tells him.
“Then I don’t want to eat,” Joe says.
A year ago, I’d have responded exactly like Joe. Now, I recognize how his ambition and willingness to risk everything makes him stubborn—how my ambition made me stubborn and self-obsessed, too. I was half-living, or living in-between. I took up jobs just to get to the next one. On the road, I fretted about the destination and then the one after that. Meals, breaks, sleep, exercise, socializing, and everything that didn’t involve writing was secondary. A successful career was my only plane of existence. But my dreams never sustained me any more than an extra cup of coffee. I was past losing myself in the moment. I had already lost myself in the dream.
In Joe’s mad dash to his body, he winds up in a cat while 22, a soul-in-training who has yet to live in the world, inhabits his body. He’s more than ready to live again, but he’s not quite there. Even on the verge of death, he falls back into the same mindset. Get to the club, play with Dorothea Williams, and then his life can begin. He’s still living like he’s on his way towards something greater.
22, however, arrives at each place in each moment. New York City and the entirety of life’s sensations are new to her. She’s never lived before so she doesn’t take anything for granted, nor is she saddled with the cynicism brought on by the sameness of our routines. She is awed by the subway while others board it absent-mindedly. She tries pizza for the first time and is visibly ecstatic. She’s absorbed by looking up at the sky and putting one foot in front of the other, things that Joe dismisses as “regular old living.”
For Joe, the obstacles that arise are in the way of his self-actualization – Connie showing up for her lesson, getting a haircut at Dez’s, fixing the seams of his pants at his mother’s shop. For 22, these are places to be and moments to soak in. The little things and small talk are life.
This is what Joe misses in his relentless pursuit for success, recognition, and validation. He conflates purpose and meaning as the same thing. Joe believes he was born to play music, so he’s not truly existing unless he’s playing. When he’s offered the career gig by Dorothea Williams herself – the thing he’s been waiting his whole life for – it, too, lands with a resounding thud.
He’s here, he made it, but this one moment cannot encompass all that life has to offer. He has to learn that he can exist outside of the measures, the keys, and time signatures. In fact, he’s been existing this whole time. He just needs to see that for himself, or rather, outside of himself.
I’d been so caught up in wanting to create that I forgot how to live. I had to re-learn how to be myself again. Jobless in a pandemic, my days were formless, improvised. I didn’t have any place to be, no one to report to, so there wasn’t a rush to be anywhere or do anything. I focused solely on each task as it came. Making the bed. Getting dressed. Eating breakfast. When was the last time I sat down and ate my breakfast without thinking about what happens next? Those were the best eggs I’d had in a long time.
One morning, I went for a walk around the neighborhood. It’s the same walk I always embark on when I’ve hit a stumbling block. Instead of letting myself get lost in thought, I looked all around me. I stared at the shape of neighboring houses and how the outlines of them seemed to rise and fall in tandem with the mountains in the distance. I listened to the trees rustling and eavesdropped on nearby conversations—things I worked so hard to blot out while working at home. I heard birds chirping on the power lines above, dogs barking as I passed, and felt the lap of the wind gathering as cars drove by. I thought about how self-absorbed I might’ve looked on these walks prior, and how foolish I might look now experiencing all of the above, all at once.
Then, when there was a break in cars passing by, and the dogs and birds ceased, I felt it. Completely, unutterably still. Maybe the birds were still chirping and the dogs were barking and there were cars passing by and I just didn’t mind for a moment. I felt like I was here, really here – alive.
As Joe plays the movie’s centerpiece “Epiphany” tune, he removes the music sheet on the stand and places each of the trinkets that 22 collected throughout the day. Leftover pizza crust, a metro card, a lone leaf; meaningless things on the surface, but every single one of them has its own story to tell, each one greater than the sum of its parts.
Joe Gardner is more than an artist or an instructor. He’s also a son, a friend, a confidant, a mentor, and an inspiration. There’s no way Joe’s life amounted to nothing. He’s lived more than he could possibly imagine in a song. That’s when he proves he’s ready to live again.
For someone who felt like a lost soul before the pandemic, Soul was everything. It was my own out-of-body experience to help me realize how I’ve been living so far, and the ways that are still possible; a plea that one cannot write off a lost year any more than you can write off a lifetime. Our lives are not nothing. Life is happening in places we often forget, in the everyday grooves we overlook. It can be as momentous as a promotion or as mundane as getting coffee. Meaning is where we find it, not the other way around.
Soul was a reminder that I’m alive on this big blue planet of ours hovering in space. I needed that more than I needed a dream coming true.
