Sharing

I have just finished an essay on the importance of multimedia as a means of communication, and it got me to thinking about the whole issue of sharing information and feelings with other people. Information is one thing, but sharing one's self is a very different ball game altogether. To share ones self is a risk and sometimes that risk is worth taking. At other times it may not be and there lies the difficulty.

One of my favourite movies is Tim Burton's Big Fish. A wonderful fantasy and feelgood movie that bears watching over again. Billy Crudup plays the son and Albert Finney, the father. It is a filma bout coming together and for the son, to reach an understanding of the father, who has brought him up with stories, many of which are so far fetched as to be seen as lies. The son, through a close examination of those stories begins to realise that his father is more special than he realised and that his stories were a projection of his huge pesonality, and his way of communicating. The tragedy being that it takes the death of his father to allow him to reach that understanding.

I never communicated with my own father, nor him with me. I never knew him even though we shared the same house for a number of years, and I never mourned his passing. I felt no affinity for him and never missed him and that I suppose is a sadness in some ways. I guess that Big Fish, for me, represents what I would have liked to have experienced.

The fault may or may not lie within me. I have never been able to get really close to many people at all. Getting close means sharing ones self. That is hard and having taken that risk one has to live with the consequences. I am doing just that.