Moments of impact

The moment of impact. The moment of impact proves potential for change. Has ripples effects far beyond what we can predict. Sending some particles crashing together. Making them closer than before. While sending others spinning off into great ventures. Landing them where you’ve never thought you’ve found them. That’s the thing about moments like these. You can’t, no matter how hard you try, controlling how it’s gonna affect you. You just gotta let the colliding part goes where they may. And wait. For the next collision

That line is from the film The Vow, which I watched this weekend. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s about a husband and wife who are in a car crash – when she wakes up she can’t remember the last five years including her husband. It’s inspired by a true story of a woman who lost the memory of her husband but they are still married today and have children after sticking to their wedding vows and falling in love all over again.

Life’s all about moments, of impact and how they changes our lives forever. But what if one day you could no longer remember any of them?

This is also from the film. To me, it’s a powerful thought that moments of your life make up who you are and what you want out of life and love and if you couldn’t remember those moments, how might that change you and your outlook on both? And if you couldn’t remember all the choices you made, would you make them again?

In the film, Paige the woman who loses her memory has lost five important years – years when she walked out on law school, her family and her fiancee, became a bohemian artists, a veggie and fell in love with a man who fit into her new world but not into her old one. So when she forgets all those choices, she slips back into her old life, unable to understand why she threw it all away, and turns her back on her husband Leo.

What I liked about the film was it takes Paige on a journey to remember not the memories she lost, but the person she wants to be. She never regains her memories, like the woman the story is inspired by, but she becomes the person she wanted to be first time round – and arguably, the person she was meant to be. And then goes to find the man she was meant to be with.

First she has to understand who she is before she can find her husband again.

Life is a journey full of choices, decisions and change and it all adds up to making us who we are. I can’t imagine losing years of your life like that but I’m inspired by the thought that you could still be the person you were always meant to be.

Paige: I hope that one day I can love you the way you love me.
Leo: You figured it out once. You’ll do it again.