THE GHOSTS WE CHASE BY BEN WACHTEL

From the beginning I’ve wrestled with life pulling me in opposite directions. The constant tension between past, present, and future has left me feeling lost. I don’t think I’m alone in that. I was watching Marvel’s Daredevil and two lines really grabbed me:

“… I was angry. I’d change that if I could”

“If God allowed that, there’d be no future, just people endlessly rewriting the past.”

That’s what we do. In movie, in business, in our lives. We spend so much of our time saying, “this time it’ll be better.” And then we film Fant4stic. He ‘next big thing’ looks little different from what it did years ago.

I think the reason that I – that we – hold onto the past is because there’s truth there. But when we start trying to recreate that truth, the process of replication kills what we loved about the original. Think about your favorite stories. The hero never gets exactly what they were looking for. Pixar’s Up is a perfect example. Carl spends so much time chasing the past only to discover that what he’s really been chasing is a ghost. His focus on the appearance of the past, rather than its truth, blinded him. The love and family he really wanted were always right at his side – it just didn’t look like Ellie anymore.

What ghosts have you been chasing? What’s your ghost obscuring? Go seek out the truth hiding there. Build something that no one’s seen before and you’ve known all along.