By Dencio S. Acop (Ret. Col.)
“Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’, boy!” This line was said by the character of Clint Eastwood to a bounty hunter out to kill him in the movie The Outlaw Josey Wales. The bounty hunter had said: “There ain’t much livin’ these days”. Movies are not real life but many of them reflect the latter. My late father loved Hollywood movies and my little brother and I tagged along as boys growing up. He especially liked cowboy movies which were a lot back in those days after the war. Dad said movies took his mind off work and whatever bothered him. I picked up on his habit. I’d say that like reading, seeing movies allows us to not only be entertained but pick up on a few things that make us realize what really matters. In this piece, I’d like to talk about a couple of things. One is that people are creatures of habit. The other is people’s unwillingness to change.
My first point is that people are creatures of habit. Good or bad, people often find it easier to stay on the path they’ve already taken rather than go on another one that is unfamiliar. That bounty hunter Clint said that line to had already left when he realized his chance of survival against a gunslinger was low. But then he returned to the saloon and told Clint: “I had to come back”. To which our protagonist replied: “I know”. The mercenary was soon flying out of the saloon dead with a hole right through his heart. Shame, humiliation, or surrender must have been part of his reason to bite the bullet but that’s beside the point. Fact is that the ex-soldier had gotten so used to killing that he couldn’t see anything else besides.
Relative to our illustration, why is staying the path the tendency of most rather than trying out a new course? Well, I am sure people have all kinds of reasons. Whatever the reasons are, one truism stands out. It is that our comfort zone seems less threatening than leaving it to embrace discomfort and plunging fearfully into the unknown. It is only when there is an urgent reason beyond our control to leave the familiar that we do, probably kicking and screaming within ourselves. But come to think of it, life is really all about change. While we may do our level best to never leave the familiar, we can’t. There are forces far stronger and beyond our control that make us bend. Life events, for one, are such forces. We grow up. We get married. We have children. We follow the job trail. We get old. We may get ill. We die. Kicking and screaming, as when we were born.
My second point is people’s unwillingness to change. While there’s good and bad in the world, I think people’s greatest “sin” (if we can call it that) is their unwillingness to change even for the better. Like that bounty hunter in the Clint movie. Like any good soldier when the war is over, ex-combatants simply need to transform back into being regular civilians and find decent jobs. It may not be that easy of course. But it is what it is. And it goes for any other human condition that necessitates changing for the better. Change manifests in our daily lives – our choices, our actions. As Peter Drucker once said, expect turbulence as the only constant in life is change. In essence, the day we stop changing is the day we die. Take criminals, for instance. Criminals do die, more commonly and frequently than most people. Spiritually, we all die to our sins if we refuse to change for the better. In today’s utterly distracted world, many of us may think we are living but are actually dying. And dying isn’t much of a living.
