It just doesn’t matter

I have been occasionally deeply affected by movies. I hope I’m not alone in that. But the particular movies that have branded my soul may not always strike others as worthy of reverence. Some have been quite superficial, low-budget cinematic pieces of fluff. Today, a loved and oft-quoted movie from one year BC (before children) revisited me because of a news program on National Public Radio.

The reporter was talking about an interview done seven years ago with an Iraqi woman who earned her living washing the dead to prepare them for mourning and burial. She had cleansed all ages, in various states of damage, casualties from the war with the United States and the lethal antagonisms between the country’s factions.

The woman was being interviewed now a second time, after much has changed in her country. She is still washing the dead, but now in the south of Iraq, and her customers’ passing is mostly from illness or old age. The interviewer asked her how she managed to maintain a sense of optimism after so many years of being the last hands to care for dead people. She has lost family, her husband left her for another wife and she trades her own shabby clothes for those of the departed when their garments are in better condition. “What do you have to be positive about?” asked the reporter.

Her answer astounded me. She said, “I have seen so much death, it no longer is remarkable or fearsome to me. We all die. Life is only for a while. Why not appreciate it rather than resisting its natural conclusion?”

At that moment, the climactic scene in the 1979 movie “Meatballs” appeared in my mind’s eye.

Bill Murray plays an irreverent, hip counselor in a summer camp where all the losers from middle school go, while across the lake is the rich kids’ camp where the smart, good-looking, athletic, popular kids attend. There’s an intercamp rivalry each year, with competitions ranging from cup stacking to wrestling to hot dog eating to cross-country running. At the end of the first day of the two-day olympiad, the despondent kids of the losers’ camp are moping about the lodge hall. Their heads hang and fingers trace circles on the floor. Several of the kids complain about their sorry lot and the futility of continued effort.

At that moment, Murray begins his locker room oratory. Only instead of exhorting them to rise above their limitations and their complete lack of talent, he outlines even more specifically why there is no possible way for them to win, concluding with, “It doesn’t matter what we do. Even if we play so far above our heads we’ll have nosebleeds for a week, and win against all odds, the girls over there won’t date any of us because those guys have all the money! It just doesn’t matter what we do. It just doesn’t matter!”

All eyes are on Murray as he raises his emotional pitch to that emphatic end of the litany of woe. Then he takes the campers into a chant: “It just doesn’t matter! It just doesn’t matter! It just doesn’t matter!” Soon all the kids, the counselors and Mickey the camp administrator are jumping around the lodge shouting, “It just doesn’t matter!!”

They do win the olympiad, of course, but that’s not the point. The message Murray was sending is that so much of what we think about winning or losing, getting ahead or falling behind, really doesn’t amount to much in the larger scheme of things. Murray’s loser campers won, but their goal was to just let go and not care about the outcome. Their goal was to have fun and not hold back.

Each day, many of us infuse our experiences with our own sense of progress or digress, a feeling of winning or losing, a judgment of whether we should be satisfied or regretful. We experience difficulties, even life-threatening illness or injury perhaps, and we muster up the fighting spirit to go battle again, wounded but determined. We live life as a struggle against failure, which is struggle against dying.

The body washer and camp counselor Murray both understood that by accepting the worst that will happen to us, we are finally able to truly and fully experience the best.

Sewitch is an entrepreneur and business psychologist. He serves as the vice president of global organization development for WD-40 Company. Sewitch can be reached at sewitch1@cox.net