Because we’re fascinated by relationships, personal growth and our desire to understand why we are the way are and why we do what we do, we’re always talking about and exploring relationship lessons and how they work, both with our coaching clients and in our personal lives.
Although the 2004 movie “Crash,” which was up for several awards, is violent and can be difficult to watch, we wanted to pass along our thoughts about how the film’s message has some important life lessons if you are open to them.
The movie is set in Los Angeles and the first words spoken as we watch several cars crashing into one another on the freeway are these–“Sometimes I think that people in this town crash into each other so they can feel one another.”
The rest of the film depicts how people “crash” into one another in various ways for various reasons.
This “crashing” is not just the crashing into one another with vehicles but how people crash into one another in a million other ways, either consciously or unconsciously.
Here are some of the themes we see in the movie and how they relate to our personal and spiritual growth:
Theme #1: We’re ALL connected.
It’s our belief that we are ALL connected on many different levels and this movie was a huge reminder for us about that. This movie “Crash,” through the intersection of the different characters, showed that we are all connected.
Theme #2: There are No accidents
The movie showed us that the Universe is totally on purpose and is in every moment conspiring to teach us what we most need to learn, face, heal and open to through our personal interactions with the other people in “earth school.”
Marianne Williamson once said that “You can come to the truth through joy or through pain and the choice is up to you.”
The characters in this movie certainly learned their life lessons through pain. We find that sometimes we can also learn and get additional distinctions for how we want our lives and relationships to be and what we want our beliefs to be by learning from the power of contrast.
This movie gave us many opportunities to look at and say “I don’t what that” or “I want to make the world a better place by doing this….”
Theme #3: Humanness
Seeing movies like this helps us to see the humanness and spirit in everyone. Movies like this are a reminder that we all have the same problems, challenges and issues that we’re dealing with, even when we appear to be coming from radically different worlds. Sometimes it’s helpful for us to see that there’s a reason why people act the way they do when they cut us off in traffic or we see on TV or read about someone killing someone or doing something harmful to themselves or others.
Everyone probably has their own interpretation of what this movie means to them but to us, at the bottom of all of this “crashing” is the idea that we are all connected to each other and that we are all doing the best we can to feel that connection.