Mastering Life

In the film Julie and Julia, we are provide with an interesting contrast between the story of Julia Child’s start in the cooking profession and blogger Julie Powell’s one year challenge to cook every recipe in Child’s first cookbook. Child, married to a career diplomat and living in Paris, begins her adventure by seeking to engage her mind and time doing something she loves – eating good food. Julie seeks to prove her worth to herself and her friends, also by doing something she loves -- writing and cooking. It takes Child over seven years to write her famous book and many more to get it published. I found this reassuring given the ten plus years I have spent producing my film series. Julie becomes a stunning success after only a year. I felt dismissive.

Clearly, I have some judgments about Julie that bare examination. Julie was motivated by EGO, the desire to prove herself to her friends. She piggybacked on the work of another and she was an overnight success (ok, over-year success)! Child, in contrast, was motivated by her sheer love for food, was amazingly courageous in bucking gender stereotypes and praise-worthy for her many years of perseverance in writing and publishing her book. She was also played by actor, Meryl Streep, and thus irresistible. Reexamining my judgments I realized that neither woman is better than the other and both have something to teach us about life mastery.

1. Ego: How many of us are not first motivated by a desire to prove ourselves to others. The lesson from both women is to select something that we love to do. Julie shares her struggles with her ego -- her insecurity, her disappointments, her self-absorption and the near destruction of her marriage. We can identify and learn from her missteps and forgive ourselves as we can forgive her. Child, on the other hand, shows us how to stand up for our work, to resist compromising for the sake of acceptance (i.e. being published). Is this ego or not-ego? Was she so full of herself and her book that she couldn’t make the requested changes? Or was it love of her work and those who helped her that would not allow it? She won in the ends. Her book was published in its entirety. So we are grateful she resisted and can learn something about defending the integrity of our own creations.

2. Piggybacking: What artist does not learn from the work of other? It is where inspiration and ideas are birthed. Can any one look at their own creations and truly say they owe nothing to any one else? It is impossible. Of course there are limits. When is it piggybacking, when is it plagiarism, and when is it copyright infringement? It can be a confusing line that, rest assured, our copyright industry protects and expands with vigor. Julie was piggybacking on Child’s work. Child was piggybacking on her teachers. They piggybacked on those they learned from and so on and so forth back to that first caveman who discovered cooking over fire. Each one put something of themselves in the new creation that makes it truly unique. Of course sometimes they don’t, but we’ll let the courts decide.

3. Instant Success. Why degrade instant success? Struggling for years has nothing to recommend for itself. It is simply a belief one clings to in the long years of uncertainty and disappointment. “Got to put in the time!” It is a belief that can undermine us and hold us back right along with thoughts about being unworthy, not good enough and undeserving. Instead of dissing Julie for her relatively quick success, we should be celebrating her and trying to copy her. Of course there is also a lot of serendipity and luck, not to mention good connections involved in achieving what we traditionally think of as success, i.e., fame and fortune. Perhaps we should reconsider the meaning of success.

When it comes to the end of our lives, what will we remember as being most important? In a blog post at Inspiration and Chai we are told of five regrets that recur among the dying: failing to live a life true to one’s self rather than fulfilling the expectations of others, working too hard, not expressing one’s feelings, losing track of friend, and not being happy. Might a truly successful life be better gauged by how few of these regrets we have in our final hours? So, how are you doing?