I was LOST, and Always Found

I don’t know how many of my readers followed LOST; I would hope many of you did. For those who did not, reading on will not lose you, this is not just a show review.  I really hope you do read this, and offer your thoughts on either the show, or my conclusions.

Many of my co-workers did not, in fact could not watch LOST. It was too “complex” for a people breast fed on Survivor, Idol and Dancing with the Criminals. I found it more amazing that so many did become addicted to the show. What this show did, has not been done in my memory in any format other than full length film, is offer a up parable. A deep moral story. It was all about decisions.

They created a grown up Aesop’s Fable, more than a nuanced mystery. Sure, there are people bemoaning “unanswered questions,” but I think the handling was sublime: they left it open enough to let people draw conclusions based on their own beliefs.  Then they reached deep into the psyche of “this can’t be happening – but its happening” and made you suspend those very beliefs without jumping the shark errr, polar bear. They added both silliness, and seriousness while employing quotes from sages spoken by those named after the philosophers. It was a veritable candy store for the deep thinker.

Springsteen may have pointed out years ago that Adam raised a Cain; we got to see what happened when Jacob and Esau lived out their lot. It had men of science, men of faith, and men who were a combination of the two. There were maddona/whore temptresses, battling warriors for what they believed to be penultimate truths, intellectual ‘deciders’ and a Buddha whose sanity was always in question.

Let me tell you what the story told me: that I am never lost.

Ultimately, most say the simple answer is they were all already dead. Some would say they were unsettled ghosts, or living in some purgatory, or having that instantaneous flash of what they wish they had done with their lives, as lives lived out in the seconds as they passed.

I think that is not what was trying to be said.

The closing scene answered two things:

Everything you experienced was real.

There is no here, there is no now.

I found it a story about connections, ripples. These people, these people from all over the World, were ultimately connected to one another in an inescapable way. There were many “nows” at once.

This became evident as all the flash forwards, flash backs, and flash sideways occurred. In every single one, they found one another. In every single one they influence eachothers’ lives, and usually as a result of some moral decision…. in some they do better, in some not so much. But it always, always came back to how bound they were to one another.

I think this goes beyond the reincarnation idea, it goes further than the Castenada parallel universe, for in his view those universes were observably different than this one. In my mind, it offers the possibility that there are alternate universes in this time, for there is no time… there is only connections and myriad ways to experience them.

For example, in some Sayid found his beloved Nadia, yet in the end he found his beloved Shannon; while Kate floundered between Jack and Sawyer, and for Desmond there was always only Penny. The question to me is not which reality is more real; which one is truest, it is a question of living well no matter what reality one finds themselves in… being able to trust enough to fully fall and give, love and help one another. In every reality, all these disparate people interact, be it Jin and Hurley, or Miles and Sawyer. Ties, friendship and an almost fated connectivity. Soul mates. Sometimes more than one soul-mate.

Of course, that is what I take, because I am one who experiences life from a point of these invisible ties, feel that the lines of the world ties us together in a way that transcends space/time. I believe that certain people ‘ring’ one another, vibrate on the same level. I used to find it amazing how this medium, the internet, has allowed so many of my connections to come to bear. Now I find it almost inevitable. I have always felt that dreams are realities that bleed through to those of us who have become more open to it. I have always felt that I am living more than one life now. I have always felt that there are those who I connect to in an almost supernatural, fated way.

To me this story is about not just the recognition of one another, but rising up to remembering those connections consciously.

This is a modern day parable that offered the possibility that there is no true truth. There is only what you do.

For those who wonder, “How could some of them die, when they were already dead?” I offer that perhaps, like Eko, maybe their job in that line of connection was done. “Friends for a reason, friends for a Season, friends for a lifetime….” the saying goes. I suppose others could just as rightly suppose that he was “perfected” already and moved on to his nirvana.

In the end, I felt happy for all of them, save Ben. Now Ben had to move on without those he was supposed to be connected to, for he could never really make those connections. He lost his family: family from the middle east, from Australia, from Korea, from the ranks of the heroin-addicted, the abused, and the handicapped. The only loss we can have in our lifetime(s) is not connecting.

I have listened to others who followed the show, and the myriad conclusions they come to make this creation all the more amazing. Those of strong Christian Faith find it a tale of good, evil and judgment. Those more fatalist see it as nothing more that a story about “shoulda, woulda, coulda’.” Those of a sci-fi bent look at it as a ghost-whisperer story.

In the end, none of them are right or wrong.

A good story lets you take almost anything away from it, but never leaves you feeling nothing. You are never Lost when you have Found those who you are meant to.

All there is, is humans stumbling toward perfection.

And for me? All there is, is connections…. and the celebration that we find them.

(forward to the 1 min mark)