Disney’s Soul Is A Great Reminder To Start Living Our Lives

“You don’t have to find out you are dying to start living.”

This line by Zach Sobiech, from YouTube’s My Last Days series, has stayed with me ever since I heard it for the first time.

I have a thing for documentaries, movies, and shows that invoke the SPARK in me. Disney’s new animated movie Soul is a perfect example of one such movie. The movie revolves around the life of Joe Gardner, a Jazz musician who gets in a flow state while playing the piano. Joe hasn’t really had a breakthrough moment in his career, he’s a music teacher in a school and his only dream in life to become a successful musician.

He breathes jazz and his life revolves around being a successful jazz player. The story takes a turn when Joe fell down in a pit in New York street and found himself stuck in the astral plane — the space between earth and heaven.

Due to various up and downs, Joe finds himself getting the chance to interact with other souls instead of going towards the afterlife, and during this adventure, he finds the real questions about life .

What is the purpose of life ?

I have read books, articles, spend hours thinking about, heard successful leaders, thinkers, and mystique about it. This is one of those questions that doesn't really have an answer, or does it?

When Joe comes down on Earth again after death, with another soul he meets in Astral world, 22, he sees life in a totally different way.

The moment he was waiting for all his life has passed and he realizes that he doesn’t feel any different, there are no fireworks, no butterfly in the belly. It feels like he’s been waiting and excited all for nothing. At that moment he realizes that he’s been wrong about life all this life.

Ignoring life to find your purpose is the easier way to not find it

Joe’s story reminds me of my own and every person I have met in life. We spend most of our lives thinking that working hard and making more money is the only way towards happiness. For most of my life, I procrastinated on satisfaction by waiting for extraordinary events and worldly success.

There was always something I was eyeing on, and that thing had me controlled. Studying engineering wasn’t my first choice, but I had to go for it like every other Indian kid in the earlier 2010s. Most of my days during college were spent waiting to get out of college. Nothing seemed to make me happy. Even when I got the golden chance to skip engineering to study design — the moment I was waiting for for months. The joy of studying in my dream college didn’t last as I had expected.

I was back to my default state, hunting for a new milestone to be happy again. Now, my happiness was associated with getting good grades and finding myself a great internship.

As my desires kept moving, happiness kept rolling with it.

When I dug deeper, I learned that the eternal cycle I was going through is called a Hedonic Treadmill. A person tends to come back to their original happiness level despite achieving success and reward of any kind.

The occasions I waited for months and years only had a temporary effect on my happiness. All those months and years waiting was not worth it in the end.

I was so involved in the material world and being successful that I missed the point of life — to live.

When 22 tells Joe that she has found her purpose in walking and watching the sky, he shrugged her and told her to find a serious purpose. But what is a serious purpose? Is a purpose only a purpose if it can make money?

What if the purpose of life is to just live it fully?

Soul was an eye-opening movie and it talks about various esoteric topics that I haven’t touched in this article. If you’re slightly interested in learning more about the beauty of this life, another universe, and the concept of our soul, you should definitely watch it.

“In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” — Abraham Lincoln

Sometimes we do need a reminder to feel grateful for things we have but don’t pay attention to, in this case — it’s our lives.