Ben is up in the air.

I hate being delayed in airports.

Yesterday, I was supposed to fly out of SFO at 9:35PM.

Due to the limitations placed upon SFO's landing route during inclement weather, my flight home (and all of the other Virgin America flights) was delayed more than 4 hours.  All in all, I ended up landing in San Diego at 3:00AM.

Luckily for me I had my magical new toy, my Apple iPad, to keep me entertained.

I remembered that on my iPad I had a digital copy of Jason Reitman's latest film Up In The Air, and I started watching it not knowing how it would effect me...

The flim stars George Clooney as Ryan Bingham a 'career transition specialist'/motivational speaker who lives his whole life on American Airlines flights or in Hertz rental cars while living out of hotel rooms.  He lays people off for a living for companies/managers that cannot and has found that minimizing attachment is the way to living successfully.  This soon changes as he meets his counterpart, basically a mirror image of himself but with a vagina.  Suddenly his life wasn't as clear cut as he thought, he could no longer live his life like he was following his well developed work flow of getting through crowded and busy airport check-in lines or other strategies he had learned through out his career.  Ryan yearned for this woman, who woke him up from his dreary, first class executive life.  He thought he had found his place in the world, but after attending his sister's wedding he knew that what he wanted before may not be what had been striving for.

The question that really intrigued me was:

What was better for Ryan?

A life that he perfected, but was alone.

Or, a journey with someone who made his time spent on this Earth a bit more interesting sacrificing his familiar digs and life.

This is a question a lot of us have to answer for ourselves.

A lot of the time people think in absolutes, and Ryan, being no different, had been guilty of thinking in both extremes to be the answer of true happiness in his life.  He knew that he enjoyed the way he lived.   The man had streamlined every minute detail, every second, every process of his solitary existence.  He had disappeared from the lives of his family while creating this life journey for himself.  It took randomly hitting on a mysteriously beautiful stranger to make him realize how alone he had been in his journey.  This star crossed stranger was closer to him than any family had ever been, her beautiful mysterious mangetism destroyed his notions of what it meant to be happy, or to feel like his life was worthwhile.

Ryan is shown to be a very successfuly motivational speaker.  He sells his idea of THE BACKPACK, to show that people mistakenly treasure relationships and commitments to things, pictures and memories as happiness.  To drive the point home, Bingham asks the attendees of his motivational meetings to place all that they find important in the backpack and then envision their lives had this backpack been destroyed, taking away all that they found important in the process.  How could they cope with this?  It's very interesting if you really think about it.

What would you be willing to walk away from in your life?

I realized that perhaps Ryan had lamented his existence earlier in this story than he had thought.  Clear evidence that Ryan was more of a sympathic figure, and less of a cold hearted lay-off machine was when he spoke to a recently fired employee (played by J.K. Simmons).  Obviously the employee was angry and distraught by the news that he just had been fired and he berated Natalie, Ryan's young protege coworker, with angrily-worded questions on how he was supposed to support his family after being terminated, how he could possibly pay his house or how he could even face his kids.  Ryan showed the audience that perhaps we shouldn't judge this book by it's cover.  He simply asked the man, "when did you give up your dreams to come work here?"  This was after revealing that Ryan had read the man's resume and discovered the employees past in culinary arts.  (He was being laid-off from some sort of corporate/office job that paid $90K)

To me this was the major point of this narrative, obviously Ryan sold his idea of letting go of attachments and dreams and things that aren't important to "success" to people and was very successful in spreading his ideas.  Too bad, he was a hypocrite...

Unfortunately for Mr. Ryan Bingham he had doomed himself to the fact that, contrary to his teachings, the value in life is pursuing ones dreams and having someone to carry-on through that journey.

It is not the attachment to our jobs that make us fear losing them. For a lot of us, our jobs are only important to us so we may provide for ourselves and our families, thus is our major motivation for doing it everyday 9-5, Monday through Friday.  The quickly arriving shock of finding a way to pay the bills or supporting your family is something that would bring tears to the eyes of all of us, not necessarily (unless you are truly blessed) because we genuinely loved what we did before we got fired.

Ryan and Natalie explained to the recently laid-off employees:
This is not the end.  You can find another job.  Your future is limitless. 

What we have to remember is, that in the hustle and bustle of everyday living...

There is no replacing the attachments we have to our true dreams and aspirations and the people who fill our lives with happiness.