Yesterday evening I watched Bridge to Terabithia with my 4yr old daughter, Alberta. She was definitely too young to get all of the nuance, but in the end I was surprised at the impact it had on her. At first she didn’t really believe that “the girl with the short hair” was dead. She kept insisting that I show the part where the girl died. But when she realized Leslie wasn’t coming back (after the end of the movie and a little bit more explanation on my part) she cried for a good half hour.
But I’m not writing this because of the impact it had on my daughter. I thought the movie (and presumably the book, which I haven’t read) has some amazingly deep insight about what is important in life. Specifically, there was a critical scene where Leslie (the girl with the short hair) and Jess (the boy) were coming coming home on the school bus. Leslie asks Jess whether he wants to go on a troll hunting expedition. Jess, having recently been chastised by his father, responds that she needs to get her head out of the clouds.
To me, this is an archetype for rejection. We extend that part of ourselves that goes beyond just checking the boxes, and the world tells us they don’t need it. Recently my wife Mercedes felt this way after putting a lot of herself into a project for her Master’s degree program in early childhood education. She made a really amazing visualization to commemorate her kids’ trip to the farm. It had pictures of the kids and animals that could be moved around the farm board so the kids could interact with the memory.
She ended up getting a 9/10 because it didn’t meet every point of the rubric. There you have it. That’s the world for you. We do something amazing and we get told, “Stick to the program. One point docked because you colored outside the lines!”
Part of the problem is that it takes time and effort to recognize and appreciate someone else’s gifts. And the economy is a giant machine that runs based on a precision fit between a million variously sized cogs. If we go outside the lines, our cogs don’t fit into the machine, and cogs are what sells. If it’s not a cog, it’s art, and the world has plenty of artists. We don’t need another one.
So this is our conundrum. We want to be valued for more than just our cog-making ability, but the world just wants us to shut up and color.
In my view we shouldn’t give up on being creative. But we also shouldn’t expect the whole world to care. We need to build a little bubble, an inner circle of people who are willing to put in the time and effort to understand what we have to offer and build on it.
Leslie had an inkling that Jess understood her. They had already started to build Terabithia together in their minds. No one besides Jess had ever really accepted that part of her (because parents don’t count), and this is what made the rejection so complete.
Luckily, Jess saw his mistake and corrected it. The next day he decided he would accept her invitation, and by doing so, accept her. His way of engaging was through art, so he made a fantastic drawing indicating that it was the opening day of troll hunting season. And he got her a puppy to track them.
To me this is the most important part of the movie. It was the moment when he recognized what she was offering and decided to go all in, to invest in the relationship by adding his gift to hers.
Of course, the story doesn’t have a happy ending. One Saturday, Jess goes to the museum and decides not to invite his friend. Leslie then decides to go into Terabithia by herself and is killed trying to cross a flooded stream. Although, as I mentioned earlier, the movie doesn’t actually show her death and my daughter still isn’t quite sure that she believes it. This morning when she woke up the first thing she asked me was whether I could show her how Leslie dies. She wasn’t even sad, she just isn’t quite ready to understand death.
One reason why the ending is so tragic is that it seemed like the kids had just figured out the secret to happiness, and then it was stripped away. It is likely Jess would never find another person like Leslie. He eventually responded in a “healthy” way by introducing Terabithia to his little sister. But she was really too young to provide him with the kind of acceptance and deep understanding that he needed.
Early in the show Leslie writes an essay about scuba diving which ends with something like “I didn’t have time to see everything I wanted, but that just made it all the more special.” The implication perhaps is that the briefness of her life made it shine even more brightly. This is probably true, but it isn’t really the lesson I take away from the show. To me, the shock of her death proves how “right” they were in their approach to life.
Jess and Leslie had found the secret to happiness. It has everything to do with finding someone who will accept your gift, fully, and thereby allow you to build an inner world together where you won’t just be cogs, but Kings and Queens.
I don’t think that we can or should be fully satisfied by the world we build with one other person, but it is where we should start. Once you have established your Terabithia you can reach out to find your place in the rest of the world, but there will always be diminishing returns to every other relationship. Within your bubble you are royalty, but to the world you will always be a marketplace transaction. And in between your kingdom and the machine lies your tribe.
