Robert Redford [pause for sigh] is Tom Booker, The Horse Whisperer. A man who says he helps horses with people problems. Tom falls in love with the confused but lovely, Anne MacLean. It’s a subtle smoldering from afar as Anne is married to another and Tom Booker is, well, a gentleman.
Anne, the recently fired manager editor of a Vanity Fair-like magazine, is at a cross road in her life. She was a Manhattan super woman. She had it “all” money, power, prestige. Jobless she’s left wondering now what? She doesn’t know but she looks to Booker’s simple farm life with envy, and she wonders if she’d like being a rancher’s wife. They have long talks and Tom asks her if she knows what she wants. She says she doesn’t know. He says to her,
“knowing is the easy part; saying it out loud is the hard part”
What do we know? What is that doubt that plays in our heads but that we’re afraid to say out loud? Often long before we admit our relationship has gone sour, or our children aren’t getting enough attention or the refrigerator needs cleaning out we have a sneaking suspicion. A quiet nagging that we’ve left the reservation. We don’t know what to do next, so we silently suppress the information. I think I do it because if I say, out loud, what I feel in my heart then I’m going to have to rearrange my comfortable life to be true to what I know.
The inertia of an object in motion is so easy, wake up follow your routine go to bed repeat in the morning. It’s easy but authentic? Not so much. Derailing a freight train isn’t so easy, but sometimes it’s necessary to get back to the track you meant to choose. Ending the numbing pain of moving miserably down a path you never intended for yourself (or those you love).
Aside from your demise, there’s no real line of demarcation, no real “point of no return” but if saying it out loud is the hard part, why not, at least start there?