The Power of Will (Metaphysics)

In my communication class, we watched a film called In America. The film features a family from Ireland who has lost a sense of themselves and strive to regain that sense by starting a new life in America. Each member of the family deals with his/her own personal internal struggles; however, each of them share a commonness of lost due to the death of a family member (the 4 year old son). This film provides an insight inside the world of myth. It captures a sense of what it means to believe in something, not just faintly but wholeheartedly until it classifies as being sacred. The family went through many toils. The parents had difficulties providing for their two daughters, but they did the best they could in hopes that everything would soon workout for the best.

Johnny Sullivan, the father of the family, exemplifies a man who has died in the inside. He lives his life as a ghost, or a walking zombie. This is a result of the inability to sufficiently provide for his family’s needs and the guilt he feels from the death of his son, Frankie. However, Mateo, a fellow resident in the family’s apartment building and soon to be friend, resurrects Johnny from his dead state and helps him to open his eyes. Mateo aides Johnny in finding physical courage, in which is not the “assertion of egocentric power” but “a valuing of the body as the means of empathy with others, as expression of the self as a thing of beauty and as a rich source of pleasure” (Rollo May). One’s self ceases to experience condemnation, and gains the pleasures of respectable pride.

Where does this will inside of us come from to help us keep going? Out of all the many ups and downs that the human body...the human soul endures, why haven't we just given up? There has to be something outside of us; something more powerful than us that keeps us moving because I'm almost sure that if we had our own choice we would just simply give up on life. I do believe that a friend or family member can help motivate a person to keep going, but the will to actually make such a decision derives from somewhere beyond us.