Nothing Is Something

Sometimes I take time off. I am doing that this weekend. I did it yesterday and I am still doing it today.

I have done nothing and yet I have done everything.

I have watched movies. Movies fill me up. They often make me laugh and sometimes they make me cry. It is a rare movie that doesn't touch me in some way.

I wonder if it was like that for my mother. I don't think so. She wasn't much of a TV person. She was a theater person. I think what I find in movies might be the same thing she found in theater.

I watched a movie with Patty Duke playing an Amish woman. One of her lines had to do with dealing with something that was hard. It went something like this...."Heaping blame on yourself is the easy way. It takes more strength to go straight toward what is wrong and handle it." I liked that line. I have remembered that line.

I watched a movie called Freedom Writers with Hilary Swank. It was wonderful. Miep Gies, the woman who hid Anne Frank, was in it. She said a wonderful line that I have learned is a Miep Gies quote. "But even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can, within their own small ways, turn on a small light in a dark room." I liked that line. I like believing any one of us, in our own small way, can turn on a small light. It matters not how big or small we are. Children do it all the time in their innocence.

And, today I am watching a movie called Our House with Doris Roberts. She plays a lonely, rich widow who makes a suicide attempt. A young homeless woman saves her life. Doris ultimately takes multiple homeless people into her exquisite home and changes their lives while they change hers. It is filled with kindness and humor and mutuality. Who is helping who?

It is my time off. I am watching, smiling, laughing and crying. And, I just might make some jello. I have some Reddi Whip that just might top it off.

Am I doing nothing? Nothing could be further from the truth. I am doing the best something I know for me.

Monday will come soon enough,and my nothing that was something, will stay with me.