‘The older you get, the fewer things you really love.’

Over the weekend I watched The Hurt Locker not once, but twice.  It was that fascinating to me.  The movie depicts the 365 day deployment of Sgt. Will James and his team in the Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD).  I can write an entire blog alone on The Hurt Locker, but I will just strongly suggest you watch it.  It is not the most truthful depiction of military action overseas, as a lot of what Sgt. James and co. do would never fly in the military, but nevertheless, it is a great movie. Anyone that knows me knows I am a huge military buff, but this movie really opened my eyes to a lot of the emotional turmoil these soldiers go through.

The last hour or so of the movie is really the best part.  In one of the final scenes Sgt. James goes back home and while talking to his son he tells him:

You love playing with that.  You love playing with all your stuffed animals.  You love your mommy, your daddy.  You love your pajamas.  You love everything, don’t you? Yeah. But you know what, buddy? As you get older, some of the things you love might not seem so special anymore. Like your Jack-In-a-Box.  Maybe you’ll realize it’s just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal.  And the older you get, the fewer things you really love.  And by the time you get to my age, maybe it’s only one or two things.  With me, I think it’s one.

I don’t know about you, but every time I watched that scene it sent chills down my spine.  The line ‘the older you get, the fewer things you really love,’ hits home.  Think about it, I mean really think about it.  When you are a child everything is new and whimsical, you fall in love with every new encounter.  As we get older, the world looks a lot more harmful than helpful, and we have experienced so much that it takes something extraordinary to get that zeal back from the mundane.  Sure, I am over generalizing here, there are days (most days) I see everything in the world and am in love with it; the same views I see in my daily commute, the corner store flowers I pass every day, most days I look at them and smile, but I still don’t have that same love for things as a newly discovering child does. 

It is a progression, as we get older we do not have that jovial love for everything we once had.  But is it so true that as we get older we really only have room in our heart for one or two things?

Unlike Sgt. James, I do not think that is true, that by the time you’re his age you only love one or two things, but I do think he is on to something.  I think growing up means letting go of so many things.  Love is special, and if you had love in your heart for everything, it wouldn’t really be special for any one thing.  I have a love for life, a general appreciation for nature, and an obsession with finding the beauty in every day, but love?  Sgt. James has a point on that one.  The things I used to love as a child I no longer do.  I am passionate about many things, interested in many things, ferociously protective of things, but I narrowed them all down to the most important.  In my age [my quarter-life-crisis age], I know there are very few things I really truly care about or love.  I notice they are less actual things and more people or passions.  But for those things, the things that make me happy, the people I care about, I am fiercely protective of and very much in love with.  So maybe what Sgt. James really meant to say is that you love fewer things as you get older, but the intensity in which you love becomes much more abundant.

I rather love a handful of things with the intensity of the sun than love everything all wishy-washy. And thus is how I live my life.