The Universe Wants You to Rest!

I watched Bedazzled, the 2000 movie, yesterday for the first time. I had seen snippets online earlier, and Brendan Fraser’s haunting yet dreamy eyes were one of the reasons I decided to give it a try. Hello The Mummy trilogy? George of the Jungle?

Anyways, the premise of Bedazzled is that you cannot force the will of the universe, nor can you have what was never truly yours, and forcing it will result in something less than perfect for you. This reminds me of When We First Met, a 2018 movie, as well. In that movie, the male protagonist also tries to change the circumstances of the first night he met his friend, thinking that doing things differently will end with them becoming a couple, but no matter how much he changes, she ends up falling right into the waiting hands of her fiancé. Now, the protagonists of these two movies always end up as the sad sack who believes that maybe if he does it differently, things will turn out differently, but nope.

FORCE OVER WHAT IS NEVER MEANT TO BE YOURS ONLY CAUSES HEARTACHE

In Bedazzled, Elliot is given seven wishes after saying he would give anything to be with his crush Alison. The condition is that he signs away his soul to the devil, and he can always dial 666 whenever a wish isn’t going the way he wants. The first wish is a trick by the devil: he requests a Big Mac and a Coke, and the devil makes him pay for it.

The next wish has him wishing he were rich and married to Alison, and he wakes up as a Colombian drug lord, rich and powerful and married to Alison, who is cheating on him with her English language tutor. When he confronts her, she retorts that she never loved him and would rather die than have him touch her ever again! He dials 666, and the devil says he got exactly what he wanted.

He snoops around Alison’s journal with the devil, and they discover that Alison wants a sensitive man, not a rich one. He wishes to be the most emotionally sensitive man ever, one who will be loved deeply by Alison. He wakes up on a beach where he routinely bursts into tears beside Alison because he is overwhelmed by the beauty of the sun. Of course, as he is about to kiss Alison, some fuckboys, who happen to be the colleagues who bully him in his real reality, appear and begin to kick sand at him. Eventually, Alison in the beach realm says she loves Elliot but is turned off by his incessant crying and sensitivity, and she actually prefers a man who is pretentious and would lie his way into her heart and break it. And there goes Alison with the fuckboys while he tearfully dials 666 again.

Now, what I want to draw our attention to at this point is the specifics of wishes. The second wish was that he wanted to be rich and married to Alison, with nothing about how his wealth came about or whether his marriage to Alison would be a happy one. This is an important lesson for us as beings on this earth. Regardless of whatever religious dogma we follow, it is important to know that “when you pray or wish for something, you might just get it.” So not only should we be specific with our requests to God, but we should also be aware that we just might get them.

“I want to be driving next year” might end up being you driving random people around in a tuketuke.

“I will be driving my own tear rubber silver G-Wagon, in good health and wealth, that I will buy with money made through blessed means by next year.”

Of course, the subsequent wishes, where he requests things Alison would like, are met with severe inadequacies in other departments. As a strong athlete he ends up with a tiny penis. As a successful, brilliant man with a HUGE penis he ends up being gay and, despite kissing Alison deeply in the gay reality, he can’t feel a lick of sexual tension for her. See, he keeps failing because he and Alison were just never meant to be!

In When We First Met, Noah keeps ending up in the photo booth where he first met Avery, whom he loves deeply but never got to date. He decides to correct the circumstances of that day that led to him indirectly bringing Avery and her fiancé Ethan together. He first tries to use their friendship and how intimately he knows her, but she hates his guts because he comes off as a stalker. Then he tries being a rude fuckboy based on advice he got, and he ends up being just her friend with benefits. Then, from his conversation with Avery’s other friend, who mentions that stability is what Avery is attracted to, he grinds hard as a finance bro and becomes work-obsessed, fat but successful. He is now engaged to her in the new reality, but he is always away at work.

Again, we can see here that despite all of Noah’s attempts, he just can’t be right for Avery!

SELFLESSNESS AND LETTING GO

In Bedazzled, Elliot finds peace, fulfillment, and love only when he makes a selfless wish for Alison to be happy with or without him. In When We First Met, Noah finds love after he stops trying to fix things so that Avery ends up with him instead of Ethan. The last time he goes into the photo booth, he doesn’t try to get in her way. He allows events to flow as they did when they first met, while he naturally gravitates toward Carrie without forcing the hand of fate. Elliot ends up with an Alison lookalike who is as geeky as he is, while Noah ends up with Carrie, who gets all of his cringe jokes because she is also cringe herself.

See? One of the major lessons here is that what you are overwhelmed and distracted by might just be pulling you away from your real blessings. Even though the movies are written for love and lovers, I saw a deeper lesson in them. Oftentimes, it is our ego getting in the way. We are too fixated on what we think we deserve and therefore must get, while failing to mull over whether it is the best for us!

You know the same way you get irritated AF when someone bosses you to do something you were just about to do? Exactement mes chéris. The Universe also seems to take a dislike in you micromanaging everything it has in store for you. How dare you?!

En la vie, que sera sera.

Just let go and surrender.

I have had experiences of holding on strongly to things while neglecting what could serve me better. It is not even always serious things. Sometimes it could be a place or restaurant I desperately want to visit and experience, only to end up there and hate every bit of it, whereas there is another place I had little hope for, but after shrugging and ending up there, I find out it is more attuned to my spirit and vibe and I feel more at ease.

Most recently, it was a dress on a vendor’s page, where I just never seem to get clothes because people snatch them up super fast! Anyways, I was desperately trying to get the dress. I couldn’t afford it the first time the post went up, and when I had money, the dress was sold out. When I googled the dress, every other website it appeared on was in Turkey. I was desperate and hurt from imagining myself in the dress, then I told myself it was just a dress and better would come, and voila! The same dress went up again one week later, and this time around I comfortably got it. Lol, I know it sounds funny considering I used a dress, but trust me, I have a series of other examples of seemingly mundane events that I thought I missed out on, only for God to reward me beautifully with a better and more complete blessing after I sincerely let go.

ACTIVITY FOR YOU

Take stock of your wellbeing today and peacefully let go of what you have forcefully held on to. Allow yourself to carefully sift through the grains of your endless desires for the hidden jewel you kept tossing to the side. Polish it and let it shine as it was meant to be.

Till I write again. Take care, and don’t forget I luh yaaaaaaaaaa