For example, the movie with Clive Owen, TRUST, that I watched last night, depicts with some skill the complexity of our current culture's focus on sexualizing everything and then having to witness its effects on the innocent ones, the pre-adolescents and younger children who are tethered to their iPods (given by well-meaning [in this movie, affluent] parents who think they'll help protect their children), texting and receiving illicit photos from Internet stalkers while having dinner with their parents. The parents were oblivious to their daughter's plight, unable to prevent what we movie-watchers could see coming a mile away. A therapist later wisely reminds the father that we can't protect our children from everything but only be there to help pick them up after they've fallen (though if you watch this film, there's a moment that the father's lifestyle and job come into stark contrast with his apparent shock at what happened to his daughter, and we can only wonder what he will do to better align his ideals with his lifestyle).
Also, I must remind myself all-too-often (I'd have thought I'd have learned this, for good, by now) that no one's life is always in tune. Yet I keep looking for that perfect key that sounds most true, that sends its harmonies through my days and causes me to feel the rightness of the moment I am living now, in the present.
Of course, this kind of striving for an ideal can be a cause of depression (because we often fall short), yet having ideals seems to be essential to those of us who not only try to be fully present yet also are intent upon creating an even better tomorrow. It's a zig-zagged flight. . .
