Once

John Carney is the writer and director for an excellent Irish film called Once.

Warning: Once is not for those who find the F-Bomb uttered about three hundred and seventy two times to be offensive.

I spoke with a former resident of Ireland and he commented that it doesn't have the same explosive quality there it does here. It is nonetheless, a problem.

However, Carney says he got the title from what he perceives to be an Irish malaise of men sitting in the pub drinking their Guinness and saying "Once I get a new job" or "Once I get moved into a new house" or "Once I get ... " ... in short, they sit at the pub, looking for a future, better day, and never get started ... The movie is about getting started ...

Our hero participates in a profession where street musicians perform and hope for passers by to transfer some of their wealth to themselves. This is called: busking. Needless to say, these buskers don't get very wealthy. But through his day job as a vacuum cleaner repairman, our street musician pays the bills.

The key to the movie is our busker meets a young woman who will move him from contemplating success to seeing himself as a success.

How often is that all we need ... someone to give us that urge, boost, vision, and maybe even, a good solid kick in the pants ... to get us moving from where we are, to where we can be ...

It is about that gentle, loving breath of someone, on behalf of God, that moves us from our own bar stool, sipping our own Guiness, saying "Once" and that future ill defined vision, towards an increasingly immediate, more restless now.

It isn't about creating anxiety. It is about creating through ourselves what we are called to be ...

It isn't only the how of that, but it is also the when.

Timing is so often the critical element that is more of the gift of God than we may want to understand ...

In the Orient, time is not viewed in such a linear fashion, as we are prone to do in our Robert Frost -- The Road Not Taken influenced world. We too often seem to see opportunity in a linear fashion of make the right decision now, or it may not return. In the Orient, time is not seen quite the same way ... a decision deferred is still a decision, but at the same time, it may come back, and in fact, it may come back again, in better, richer, more robust fashion.

I started this talking about getting started. I finish asking myself how do we measure the when?

Peace ...