Flow State or Folly

In certain stories, the individual is strongest when surrounded by strong individuals. The kind of individuals that live their life's purpose with every action, where any purpose, big or small, can be the measure of a life well lived. Friends and family that share their individual purpose with each other.

There may be one that shines brighter in the eyes of their family, and in the eyes of the world. One that lives their purpose, and in so doing, becomes one of the best that ever was. But their place in the world as exceptional is purely incidental. A love of their chosen expression of life is what drives them.

Their peers may not feel the same. Peers may envy the one, feel threatened, or seek to consume and use the one. And failing that, peers may try to destroy the one. The threat will loom large. Existing organizations and institutions will act with their full might to incentivize those peers to destroy the one, to maintain the status quo, to maintain control and supremacy.

There will come a choice. The one must choose to surrender, or to defy death and defeat. Not to prove their supremacy, but to prove that their chosen expression of life and purpose are their own to control, and no one else's.

Once the choice is made, they may call on friends, but in the end, they must call on themselves. Reach deep inside to the purest self. Beyond skill. There is only self. There is only purpose. There is only the flow state. Win or lose, they have transcended the game being played, the contest, the challenge. Speed Racer (that's his name) shows the world what is possible. What a great movie.

But what if the purpose becomes tiring? What if the flow state is readily available, but the powers that be keep hammering. What if the hydra has so many heads that it's unclear if they're growing back or they were always there? Is there joy, self, or purpose in cutting off heads? Is it possible to transcend through the act of interminable revenge?

In the end, John Wick accepts defeat as the inevitable outcome of revenge. He borrows his friends' purposes for a bit, but they're not his own. Perhaps revenge is fatalism masquerading as transcendentalism, an echo of a life's purpose irrevocably lost. Absolute existential defeat.

What a weird way to end a movie where a dog peeing on a dead man's face is played for laughs.