No Answer to a Tricky Question

"If you did the time, you might as well have done the crime". That's what made Henry change his life. Henry is a good-hearted guy who works in a highway toll booth. One day he gets tricked into a bank robbery and unfortunately he's the only one who gets caught. He goes to prison, because he has no particular reason to stay out. He quietly serves his time, he's being left by his girlfriend, and he gets out. He returns to the bank that he didn't rob and gets run over by a car. That's when he meets a new girl, decides to rob the bank, decides to change his life.

I watched a film tonight and it made me think of a question that a good friend of mine had asked me a few weeks back. I left it half-answered and I thought about approaching it once more. Have you ever thought about reinventing yourself? That was the question my friend had asked me. I'm not sure. Possibly, I'd say. I mean, who hasn't? Almost everybody has something he is dissatisfied with. And most people have something they regret. But does it require the meeting of a girl or the robbing of a bank to think about turning one's life upside down? Probably the girl more than the bank.

But way apart from the movie now, I think that it's a darkly tricky question. Why? Because there's a number of other relevant questions attached to it. For example, why do you want to change? Does it involve other people? What are you willing to risk? I think change isn't necessarily a bad thing. First of all, because it implies movement. And I don't like stagnancy too much, which is very importantly not to be confused with stability. And in most cases, and this being my second of all, if it's half-way thought through, it should be followed by progress. But, depending on the answers to those subquestions, change can also break your legs.

Now, I know that this too is not an answer to the aforementioned question, and frankly I don't intend to give it another try soon, but I'm sure that thinking about it alone is a big step in the right direction. This here is merely a handful of even more questions and thoughts thrown out there. But the awareness of something being wrong and on top of that, maybe even knowing what you want or what you don't want, that's good, isn't it? Of course, it's easy to talk about it, but more often than not I think that change is bloody difficult. Especially when it comes to changing your self. And not the things around you.