Inside Out
On the flight to the Portugal, I did something I rarely allow time for—I watched a movie. It’s not that I don’t have time to watch movies, but I struggle to sit still for that amount of time. Believe it or not :)
Pinned in my seat for hours, I finally watched a movie I had wanted to see since the summer before this one past—the animated Pixar film, Inside Out 2. I’ll give you some background…
The first Inside Out Movie features an 11-year old girl named Riley and the inner workings of her emotions. These emotions are among the main characters of the movie…there’s Joy and Sadness, and the off-shoots of Sadness—Anger, Fear and Disgust.
The main character in 11 year-old Riley’s inner world is Joy. Even when Sadness and eventually Anger, Fear, and Disgust arrive, in the end Joy knows exactly how to help Riley navigate life. It’s all a very sweet and relatively simple story of emotions.
Inside Out 2 has more layers…Riley is now a TEENAGER And Riley has crossed the threshold from child into that precious time we all know called PUBERTY…
Now, the cast of inner emotional characters gets a whole lot more complicated. At the start of the movie, we see Joy is still the main emotional character inside Riley. But pretty quickly, Joy is replaced by a wild-eyed, electric red-haired character named, Anxiety.
Once Anxiety takes control, Joy gets pushed far off into the background of Riley’s inner world, almost to the point of being forgotten. Anxiety is quick to take over the controls of Riley’s mind. She even directs the other new characters, Envy, Embarrassment, and my personal favorite Ennui.
I love the push and pull between Joy and Anxiety, the simpler emotions encouraging Joy to reassert herself, and the more complicated ones being led by Anxiety as Riley prepares to navigate high school and varsity ice hockey try-outs. But one scene really got me…
Toward the end of the movie, with Anxiety running Riley’s mental world, Joy discovers “the Projections room.” She watches various scenes of Riley flash across a giant screen and hears Anxiety say, “We need to help Riley prepare. We are looking to the future. Every possible mistake.” As one image after another flashes through Riley’s mind, Joy realizes Anxiety is using Riley’s imagination against her.
As the tension of it all peaks, and Joy finally finds her way back into the control center, Anxiety, exhausted, turns to Joy and says, “I was just trying to protect Riley.
In the end, as Joy guides Riley through the final moments of her ice hockey try-outs, Anxiety tries to grab the controls again.
What are you afraid is going to happen?, Joy asks her. We have no friends and we die alone, Anxiety replies. “But none of that’s happening NOW, “Joy reminds her, and walks Anxiety to a comfy massage chair, gives her a cup of “Anxi-tea.” And in this one moment, we see all the emotions relax, as they remember they can’t control what happens to Riley, but they can all exist in her together.
The poet, Padraig O’Tauma speaks a message of emotions in a more refined, Irish poet way:
“In Irish when you talk about an emotion, you don’t say, ‘I am sad.’ You’d say, ‘Sadness is on me – Ta’ Bron Orm.’ I love that because there’s an implication of not identifying yourself with the emotion fully. I am not sad, it’s just that sadness is on me for a while. Something else will be on me another time, and that’s a good thing to recognize.”
Anxiety and all its counterparts—fear, anger, ennui, happiness—each is on us at one time or another. I remember (though dimly) being a teenager and the kind of anxiety at wanting to be liked, wanting to succeed, wanting to be the identity that I thought would make me better than I felt like I was.
I think of all of the identities the world tells us we are, all of the identities we take on, or that take us over. Sometimes they’re so heavy on me, that I feel like they are me. I only remember they’re not when I remember to cross back over the threshold of identity, to a spacious place of Sabbath. And I wonder, what would happen if we had moments of Sabbath in our week, in our year, and in even in our every days to us that our one, unchanging identity is that of love?
Love gives us a shot at becoming who we were made to be, not the charming actor or bodyguard we become. Love is the Sabbath identity and the Sabbath identity knows how to let go of the tightrope we are so often balancing ourselves on; it empowers us to reach out a hand, and fall into love. And love is sufficient unto the day.