Thanks to my son sharing my geekdom, a small group of 11-year-old boys and I made the 45-minute drive to Fort Collins, Colo., this morning to watch TRON: Legacy at the second-run AMC theater there. It was the culmination of an overnight birthday party for Conner that also included watching the original 1982 film on DVD, playing his TRON: Evolution-Battle Grids game on the Wii with his new TRON special edition remote control, eating a special TRON-decorated chocolate-chip cookie, opening lots of TRON: Legacy toys as gifts and even participating in Mom's very creative TRON-themed scavenger hunt.
What does all this have to do with Lent, you ask?
Well, on this fourth day of spiritual reflection, one line toward the end of the film struck me as pretty profound. (And this was the second time I've seen the movie, mind you. I noticed several religious themes the first time, but didn't focus on this aspect before.)
Jeff Bridges' character, Kevin Flynn, finally comes face-to-face with the program he created years earlier to help him create the "perfect" computer world, C.L.U. This eternally younger version of himself pleadingly asks Flynn, "Didn't I do everything you asked me to do?" Flynn tells C.L.U. that yes, in fact, he did do exactly what Flynn asked him to do. And therein lies the problem.
"Perfection is right in front of you," Kevin Flynn says.
Perfection is right in front of you. Although he tells his son, Sam, earlier in the film that C.L.U. can't be allowed to escape The Grid into our world because "what's more imperfect than that?," the elder Flynn comes to the realization that his push for perfection ultimately led to his failure.
This is a hard lesson for many of us Type-A people to learn. But unlike Kevin Flynn, I continually remind myself that it's OK to come up short of perfection. It's even OK to totally fail from time to time.
If this journey called life is to have meaning and be more than a series of items checked off a "To do" list, we have to be willing to accept the failures with the successes -- to accept that life is less than perfect. Yet maybe life actually is perfect just the way it is -- warts and all.
Pretty deep lesson for a film many critics dismissed when it came out last year as being all about the visuals and lacking both in plot and dialogue.
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