Unless You Think Otherwise

Since I view spending a couple of hours with my daughter is such a daily necessity and luxury, prime time TV viewing during the week days has become a luxury hardly within my reach. Let alone the luxury of going out for one night to see a debut of a real play in a real theatre.

Unless... Unless a generous someone drags me out and bestows me with such a luxury. And that's what happened last night. Abby took me out to see "Unless," a stage adaptation of the novel by late Carol Shields. In typical Abby-style, we took up the best seats in the house right in the middle of the second row. As a result, I could only see the whole cast from their kneels up. But, I have only gratitude to express for my friend's generosity.

Ok, this is how I see it unless people think it otherwise. It is an indigenous Canadian story by a Canadian writer: Simple things happening to simple people in their simple lives on an enormously vast land. It's much about "the pleasures of ordinary existence," in Shields' own words, though the existence is normally under stress, here and everywhere. Because life is generally much simpler in this part of the world, the fault line scoring through it could become so magnified that makes life more breakable...

In the play, the life's quotidian of Reta Winters, a writer and wife of a family physician in a small town north of Toronto , has been particularly upset recently. Her nineteen-year-old daughter dropped out of college and started street begging, for reasons unclear except the assumed pursuit of goodness. She wrote the word "goodness" across a cardboard hanging down her neck.

I read some reviews about the original book. I might want to agree the adaptation was only a good move for someone like me, who never read the book. The book is in fact not about her problematic daughter Norah, who only fades in and out of the narrative. When it's on stage though, Norah's drama gets played up, well enough to compete with the mother's role, but not enough to be a complete treatment of it's own.

Also her daughter's assumed pursuit of goodness would make more sense within the context ordinary existence instead of an act of her own. It might have been explained from the book that you don't reach the pure state of goodness unless you accept faultiness and filthiness as part of the package we call life.

To me, life is what you have here and now. Deal with it, enjoy it and live it with a cultivated sense of humour. Moreover, happiness is the decision you make, not the conditions you have or create. You could hypothesize or hypnotise that your life won't be better unless certain conditions bestow themselves on you. But, it's not happening unless it actually happens. It will cost you to sit and imagine all the "unless" situations unless you are well grounded, well, like me.