Does You Life Feel Like Groundhog Day?

Outside of the big holidays on the calendar there were three minor ones I looked forward to when I was a child: Saint Patrick’s Day – because my mother had informed me that I was Irish on her side of the family. April Fool’s Day – because what’s better in a boy’s life than a day set aside for practical jokes. But the Second of February, Groundhog Day was my childhood favorite.

 Groundhog Day was fun to a young me because the idea that an oversized rodent could predict the weather by perceiving its own shadow was so illogical. Much like the humor of Monty Python that I loved in those days, the notion of a woodchuck predicting the weather was ridiculous and absurd. So, when Bill Murray, a master of ridiculous and absurd humor, starred in a film by the same name in 1993 I just had to see it.

 Written and directed by the brilliant Harold Ramus, Groundhog Day is the story of Phil Connors, an arrogant self-serving weatherman who lives only for the day when he can have the better job and life he believes he deserves. When Connors gets sent by his home station to cover the traditional Groundhog Day festivities in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, he gets stuck in a time-loop of repeatedly living the day of February 2 for what will eventually be years.

 Realizing that there is no escaping from the loop to attain the life he wants, and that there are no long-term consequences for his actions, Phil decides that satisfaction of his pleasurable desires (Hedonism) is the best thing in life and embarks on a pleasure-seeking binge. When this too fails to satisfy him, he decides life is ultimately meaningless (Nihilism) and spends the next section of the movie attempting to end his life in a variety of hilarious (at least for the audience) ways. Still Connors wakes up, yet again, to February 2 and “I got you, babe” on his clock radio. It seems self-destruction also won’t provide him with the answer to his quest.

 Ultimately, Phil comes around to the realization that the loop is his opportunity to build something into his life through dedicated pursuit of higher goals. He spends his days becoming better – at skills, at relationships, and at life – and through these transforms into someone dramatically different than the person he was. When Phil eventually does wake up on February third he finally knows how to live well.

 I have more respect for you, my friends, than to trot out a simple morality tale like Groundhog Day and tell you, “Go live likewise”, but I do find it parallels the experiences of many of the people with whom I interact each day.

 As I write this I have at least four active clients, and many more friends, who find they’re seemingly stuck in a “time loop” for their careers or larger lives. They wake each day feeling as though they’ve gone nowhere and accomplished nothing in the previous twenty-four hours. Possessing too much character to consider pursuing Hedonism, these good people instead find themselves battling against the nagging thought that their lives have no meaning.

 Transformation, especially of our lives and selves, is a battle against the natural forces of entropy and inertia.

 Entropy is the tendency for everything to gradually decline into disorder and chaos. It’s like the gradual biodegrading of my enormous backyard leaf pile into compost and dirt, or the promise of an exceptional life given to a child but smothered by a lack of available resources and direction. Entropy takes something substantial and breaks down into nothing.

 Inertia is the tendency for things to stay the same, to remain unchanged. It’s Newton’s Laws applied to human living – we’re either in motion toward something or we’re going nowhere. Self-transformation requires us to initiate and maintain movement in the direction of order and becoming something more.

 I know it sounds exhausting, but those are the only real choices available to us. We can make a daily choice to move toward becoming something better, or we can relax and let the laws of inertia and entropy take over.

 Since the passing of my father after Thanksgiving I have found myself reflecting on “What Now?” I still feel passionate about helping people see and pursue the lives they were made for, but I also have an itch, a nagging question about what this new chapter of “life after parent care” is supposed to look like. (I tell you this simply so you can know that the coach doesn’t always have all the answers, even for himself.) But I’m also resolved that I’m going to go try on some new things, new pursuits that I may not have tried before, and see what happens. After all, the whole point of Groundhog Day is what new thing might happen the day after.