2/2/15 (Groundhog Day)
New York, New York
In the movie “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray’s character relives the same
day thousands, or perhaps millions, of times.
Each day, it starts off the same way, with the same song playing on his
alarm clock, and the same events happen to him.
I had joked that it would make a good prank for me to walk into the
office each day this week and have the same exact conversations with my
coworkers, pretending that we kept living Groundhog Day. However, tonight, I realized that we are in
fact reliving the Bill Murray movie.
We wake up at the same time each morning. We go to the same job. We do the same assignments at work. The details of the assignments might be
different, but they are pretty much the same. We make the same cup of coffee. We have the same conversations with our
coworkers. We go to lunch at the same
time. We leave the office at the same
time. We do the same activities every
evening. For the most part, day in and
day out, week in and week out, we are in fact living the Bill Murray movie.
We text back and forth with the same people every day. The conversations are the same, but we keep having
the same conversations because we love the people who are texting us, and, by
keeping in touch with them every day, the long subway ride, the Hudson river,
or the 1000 miles that separates us from our friends is reduced to the swipe of
a finger and the chirp on our phone.
Even if we go months without seeing them, we only go hours without
thinking about them. We do all of this
every day because we don’t change, because our love for them doesn’t disappear
day to day, because, whether we have loved them for months or years or decades,
we continue to love them day to day, because we are in fact living the Bill
Murray movie.
The flipside is that every once in a while we make a change in our
life, but it is not long before that becomes the new normal. We see a movie one night and then the
next. We go to see all eight Best
Picture nominees. After that is done, we
enjoy it so much that we decide to see every film nominated for an Oscar. Before we know it, we are going to see a
movie every night, and that becomes part of our daily routine. We make new friends and old friends fade
away. We break up with our girlfriend,
and we mope for a week before we find a new normal. We start looking for someone else, and that
quest becomes our new normal. We return
to our old philosophies of love, and that becomes the new normal. We start doing all the things we used to
enjoy doing, and the old normal is now the new normal. Once the new normal sets in, we are once more
living the Bill Murray movie.
While I do not think it was Harold Ramis’s intention to create a
parody of the way we live our lives, it cannot be denied that, in many ways, we
are living the Bill Murray movie.
