Soul has become another of my favorite movies. If you haven’t watched it, I highly recommend that you watch it. I don’t go over the whole movie but I do tell some parts of the movie.

The biggest lesson that I learned from the movie is that sometimes you can put too much emphasis on certain events in your life.

The main character, Joe Gardener, wants to be a jazz player. Instead he is a high school band teacher. One of his former students lands him a chance to play for a famous saxophone player. She likes his playing and gives him the chance to play with her. He calls someone on the phone and get distracted and ends up falling into an open manhole and dying.

He goes to an escalator that goes to the Great Beyond. He panics and then tries to get back to Earth. He ends up going to the Great Before and becoming a mentor.

He dreams of getting back to his life and becoming famous for playing jazz.

He thinks that if he can get back to his life and play the gig, then his life will have meaning.

I know how he feels.

I used to think that when I got married, my life would get better. I would be happy, I would be loved, and my life would be easier. Well, I still haven’t gotten married. I now know that if I had of gotten married, I would probably be divorced right now.

It took me a while to realize that getting married wouldn’t solve any of my problems. If I wasn’t happy before getting married then I probably wouldn’t be happy after getting married. A husband wasn’t going to make me happy, only I can make myself happy. I didn’t even love myself a few years ago and I doubt that I could have loved anyone else at that time.

When he gets back to his body and plays his gig, afterwards it doesn’t feel like he expected it to feel. He dreams that he would instantly become famous and have fans afterwards. Right before he goes on stage, he tells himself that his life is about to start, not realizing that his life has already begun.

After playing the gig, he then asks the saxophone player, what is next. The saxophone player tells him a story about a fish that is looking for the ocean. The young fish asks another fish where the ocean is. The older fish tells him that he is already swimming in the ocean. The young fish states that he is just in water and continues to look for the ocean.

From that story, I take that life is happening even when you are going after your dreams. Sometimes we get so busy looking for the ocean that we forget that we are already in it. Life happens every day not just when you hit a major goal or dream.

That’s a lesson that I had to learn. When I started to work on my issues, I learned that my life had already begun. I was just thinking that I needed to get married to suddenly start living.

When soul 22 was in Joe’s body, 22 learns to appreciate the small things in life. She learned to love pizza, walking, riding the subway, getting a haircut, and many other things that Joe has taken for granted.

After going home from playing the gig, Joe takes a look back over his life. He then realizes what the saxophone player was talking about with the fish story. His life has already began.

Another thing that stood out to me was when one of the teachers said that, “a person’s spark isn’t a soul’s purpose”.

Just because Joe loved to play piano doesn’t mean that it was his purpose on Earth.

When I was looking at his life, I saw that he was good at teaching the students music. He didn’t like teaching but it may have been what he was supposed to do and then play piano as a hobby on the side. I don’t know. He could be a jazz player and a music teacher at the same time.

That also made me wonder. One of the comments that I get a lot when working in the hospital is that I would be a great teacher to the nursing students. The other nursing school teachers can see that. Even while I was in nursing school, one of the teachers asked if she could pay for me to be a part of a teachers association because she could see me being a teacher. I told her no thank you but now I wish I had of said yes. That has been something that I think about but the job doesn’t pay well and I would have to go back to school, which I don’t want to do right now. Maybe in the future I will.

I don’t know what Joe did when he got his life back but I like to think that he didn’t take any thing for granted. He enjoyed the small things in life just as much as the big things. He did say that he was “going to live every minute of it.”

The movie just reminds me to enjoy every minute of my life not just when I hit a major goal.

I hope that you will watch the movie and love it just as much as I do. Let me know in the comments if you watched the movie and what lessons you learned from it.