This Week's Guest: Jason DeRose
How do you cope when everything seems sad? And how do you move on and find happiness? My guest this week is Jason DeRose. His background in divinity school taught him pastoral care, and his career as a journalist taught him how to look difficult news unflinchingly in the eye. It can be tempting to let dark feelings become overwhelming, to let them control us, or simply to run from them. But whether counseling people or reporting the news, Jason's challenge has been confronting those dark emotions, and then still feeling free to experience joy.
This Week's Recommendation: Six Degrees of Separation
Thanks again to Jason for joining me. The plan for our conversation was to talk about The Hours, a Single Man, and Six Degrees of Seperation, but we never managed to get to that last one -- so it's my recommendation for the week, a 1993 film starring Stockard Channing and Donald Sutherland as a wealthy couple and Will Smith as a surprise guest who claims to know their son. It's not much of a spoiler to reveal that Will's character is hiding more than he initially lets on, and the truth begins to emerge after an incident with a male hustler. But Stockard Channing's character has some secrets of her own -- secrets she was keeping even from herself.
In their guest's hidden depths, she finds depths of her own re-awakened -- a dissatisfaction to which she'd long grown numb, but once alerted to, can no longer ignore. The title of the film, Six Degrees of Separation, refers to how interconnected we all are. You're never far from knowing anyone else, and finding something of yourself in them. A chance encounter with a stranger can change not only your life, but what you expect out of life, and what makes you happy.
There's some ambiguity to the movie's ending, but ultimately I like to see it as a story about no longer waiting for permission to be free, to be happy, to be fulfilled, even when you thought all the doors to those feelings were closed -- or that there weren't even any doors worth looking for.
Thanks again for listening. The show takes about ten hours to produce each week, and it's thanks to the support of patrons like Wilfredo and Radio Free Qtopia that we're able to keep the show going. Support the show on Patreon here.
Clips of Stuff We Talked About
Music
Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/