Man on Wire

Flipping through the free movie channel on another iced-in day free of school (for the 3rd day in a row... soon to be 4th... sooo unlike SMU) actually proved to be enlightening. As my roommates shuffled around our apartment, I sat, entranced with what I was watching for 90 minutes straight. Philippe Petit, a Frenchman with a crazy passion for walking on wires at unimaginable heights, mostly between public monuments around the globe, has inspired me. Although some of Philippe's words were rather ominous and to some extent morbid when he discussed the possibility of his own death occurring during any one of his rope-walking feats, this quote stood out to me;

"If I die, what a beautiful death, to die in the exercise of your passion." 

Of course, one's passion does not, in any sense, need to be life-threatening in order to have substance, but I think that passion is what drives us, what pushes us to want more from life, and to move us to arrive at some sort of awakening at the discovery of what our individual passions truly are.

What Philippe represents, for me at least, is the drive (which I believe is in all of us) to do something great. Doing something which personally resonates does not mean attempting the pursuit of a passion for notoriety, or to go down in the history books, but to reach a goal or to create an experience that you feel is meaningful, maybe even life changing. It can also mean living your life a certain way, maybe embodying a certain perspective, or setting some sort of standard to live by, and not necessarily having one specific reason for doing it. Philippe hits the nail on the head for me, regarding personal motive;

"You know, [I was repeatedly asked] 'Why, why [did you do this]?' and that was a very, again, in my way of seeing America, a very American finger-snapping question. I did something very magnificent and mysterious, and I got a practical 'Why?' And, the beauty of it is that I didn’t have any 'Why!'"

 In the words of Nike, 'just do it,' seems to be Philippe's personal mantra. Not every action needs to be abundant with meaning, scrutinized, analyzed, or picked apart for a deeper significance. It was apparent that Petit possessed an urgency to rebel, to exercise his passion in extreme fashions, and I think what he meant, when refusing to answer "Why?!?," was to leave his actions up to interpretation, for individuals to gain inspiration, hope, whatever feeling they attained from witnessing his incredible displays of daring with such calm. The great thing about Philippe is that he's still at it in his old age, maybe not to the extremes of rope-walking 100+ stories above city streets, but he continues to exercise his passion on a wire between two trees in his own backyard.