I was driving when it happened.

I had asked what Arrival was really about, and a voice was reading the answer back to me through the car speakers. I wasn’t expecting much, it was just an ordinary drive.

But as the voice got to the end, I felt my eyes welling up. And I was smiling heavily at the same time. I guess I didn’t choose either one.

The movie is about a woman who gets to see her whole life before she lives it. She sees that she is going to have a daughter, she sees all the love that comes with her, and she sees that she is going to lose her too. She knows the ending, and she knows the pain that comes with it. Yet she chooses it anyway.

That is the question the movie left me with. If you knew exactly how your life was going to go, all of it, the good and the loss waiting at the end, would you still choose it?

I would choose it because I know there would be true love in that life, that is the part that most matters to me. Even the losing part is beautiful in its own way. To know that love reached an ending but you lived and experienced sharing it is the part that hits me. Preparing for pain never really goes as you’d expect. You can’t know how much something hurts until it does. So we live through it and know that so many countless others go through hard things and come out the other side prevailing. Or not…

What this movie really did was make me appreciate the beauty in life. I’m sure many of us have been humbled before. But it almost feels defensive, as if you are fighting against someone, when honestly we just have to appreciate how fortunate we are to be living. To have lived and experienced love is such a powerful thing. To know you are not alone, that there are people out there like you, that we breathe and see and live similar things. Isn’t that beautiful. I can’t help but call life nothing short of that. A gift even.

I’m not trying to place everyone as equal. Some suffer more misfortune than others, some very badly. But the fact that I’m writing this on my own computer, in my own home, in the terminal, with a roof over my head, food, time, and a nice place to sleep should be enough to make me feel at peace. How many do not have this? How many experience love and humanity scarcely? To love and to be loved, and not just people, but plants, nature, water, air, whatever, to be in this life is to be loved for all it has to give. To feel pain, suffering, sorrow, but also happiness, understanding, communion. They go hand in hand. It is all what we call life. And everything is beautiful, even in its own messed up way.

Whatever you believe, or even if you believe in nothing at all, I think the message is the same. I keep coming back to the Christian iconography, to the absolute form of love given to us by Jesus Christ. It was so profound to understand, even if minutely, that someone sacrificed himself for us. There are few words I have for an action like that. Beautiful falls short of how loving it is.

That’s what it comes back to. Love. It’s all about love.