The Way

Just finished watching The Way for the second time. Add it to the list of movies that gets to me at a very visceral level.

The story of a father making a trip his son failed to complete — it resonates for me in that sense of discovery that comes with wandering. You meet people you’d never normally meet, and even though everyone wanders for their own reasons, the very fact that, for whatever the cause, the end result lead to wandering is its own commonality among those along the way. There’s a “band of brothers” effect that comes with those you meet.

There are bad days as well as the good ones. Things you have to cope with. Decisions you make that lead you to more problems to deal with. But there’s a certain immediacy of it all. What will happen today? How will this affect tomorrow? The rest of your life you can, at least temporarily, set aside. And when you can’t set it aside, you still gain the opportunity to study life from the outside. That change to your perspective is something you can’t realize until you’re there.

Of course, the failing of the movie is they never get rained on.