God: the Movie Producer

I was thinking of it this way: what if God is a movie producer... and all our stories, our lives are somewhere on a shelf in some Video Library of the Universe?

For some that image would imply predestination... that we have no choice in the plot of our stories. But suppose the lens of the camera is through our eyes. We're not only the main characters in our plots, we are the viewpoint as well. We're also making up our lines as we go along—the quintessential ad lib routine...because we don't know the plot. We've not been allowed to read the whole script through. Things may look pretty grim in Act III, but there's always hope for a twist of fate... a happy ending.

I've noticed that in most movies, a happy ending means just the opposite. It means that there's a promising beginning, pointing to some pleasant and productive future. It's why I cry at happy endings. (Well actually I used to cry because I never believed in my own promising or productive future.)

We seem to want to avoid endings in our own lives. Freeze the action right here, right now. Status quo. It doesn't work that way. Time drags us along, sometimes with dignity, sometimes kicking and screaming, but dragged along nonetheless. Sometimes time appears as the enemy, when in fact it is one of those survivaling laws of our material, natural world. "Survivaling"? is that a word? Okay so I made it up. Time warps, it slows, it speeds up, but it never stops. When it stops the world (as we know it) will end too.