A story about this — 2 years ago
My book group watched this movie last week, and because I was busy helping with VBS, I could not watch it with them. But I was able to watch the movie later that night with a friend.
The movie reminded me of this entry that I’d made last March on 43 Things about a dream (or maybe more a nightmare) I had. That dream seemed to be all about fear, and in my dream all the fear was focused on crossing a rope bridge. In my dream, I decided that I couldn’t do it.
In this documentary movie, the “Man on Wire”, Phillipe Petit, dreams of crossing on a wire between the World Trade Center Towers as soon as he reads an article about them, before they were even built. He plans and schemes for years about how he can accomplish this seemingly impossible, and certainly death-defying, feat, gathers a group of assistants, and does practice runs on the towers of Notre Dame and the bridge over the Sydney harbor in preparation.
The movie gave me a lot to think about. Here is the story of someone who really seems to know how to befriend fear, something that’s been on my mind a lot lately.
There’s a review of the movie here at the Spirituality and Practice web site, and they relate the story to the spiritual practices of “attention” and “imagination”. This might give me some further ideas of how to befriend my own fear. I’m glad I watched this movie.
