This section was suggested by a dear supporter and friend, who’s known me since I was a silly, brash kipper in university. (You know who you are! Thank you!)
I’ve learned to be cautious about sharing what I’m reading and viewing, because I do both on multiple levels. And yet, to say, “hey, this is the cultural object I’m engaging with right now” can often be read as an endorsement. It sometimes is. Other times, though, I’m looking at it as I might a chess board: What are the strengths of both positions? What are the weaknesses? What might have brought someone to play the game this way in the first place?
The first piece, before that dreadful paid-content fold, is an endorsement.
The rest I’m sharing as chess boards—neither fully endorsing nor condemning. Just saying that, hey, this was a space where I wrestled with ideas this month. Maybe it will invite a little wrestling with ideas for you, too.
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse
Last Christmas Eve and Day, a short film adapting a modern classic of a children’s book hit the British and US airwaves. (It’s also available on Apple TV.)
It was both an unusual and a perfect choice for those air dates: a quiet meditation on the value of human life, completely separate from specific religious traditions—while still working well with the core, best principles in them all.
Like the 2019 book it was based on, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse follows a child who is looking for a home, who finds it in the company he keeps, and who learns that we are here to love and be loved, even when one errs and even when the world is hard. It’s a deeply humanist lesson, crafted to include everyone with its light-touch allegories for internal, external, and mixed existential crises in our lives.
When the short film first aired, I doubt most of the viewing audience expected to find it such a gut-punch in its simplicity. Reviews from initial viewers often admit to deeply emotional reactions… in part, because like the best children’s books, this one by Charlie Mackesy distills hard-won wisdom into simple truths, told beautiful.
(For that same reason, some on the internet of course despise it, too. How dare a children’s tale try to “manipulate” viewers with such big feelings and concepts!)
What I love about films like this one—and yes, I was definitely among the group of people who cried while watching, sucker that I am—is that it reminds us that we can tell different stories from the outset for fellow human beings. Most of my life has been shaped by trying to repair extremely unhealthy early conditioning. Like most of us, though, I know that the imprint it’s left on my habituated responses will never go away completely. A part of me will always be the child who grew up with the messaging that their existence created suffering for those around them. Even though I know that messaging was false, it shapes a person. So too does the anxiety and fear I lived with because of it, and the harm I did do out of both places in my adolescence and early adulthood. The sheer mess I see in the snow fields in my wake.
A film like this doesn’t necessarily offer hope of drastic transformation in me.
But it does give me hope that we can do better by the people who come after us.
My messy imprint, and all the flaws it leaves me with today, need not be the destiny of ever so many others. We can tell better stories for them.
Even I might tell a story or two that will help another on their way.
Maybe you will, too.
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