Pressure And Time

 

In the film Shawshank Redemption, the character Otis Redding, known as 'Red', and whose dialogue is spoken by Morgan Freeman, makes an assessment of his friend Andy Dufresne: 'Oh, Andy loved geology. I imagine it appealed to his meticulous nature. An ice age here, a million years of mountain building there. Geology is the study of pressure, and time. That's all it takes, really. Pressure, and time'.

That long-term perspective was what enabled Andy, a man derailed by unforeseen disaster, to tunnel out of a maximum security prison and escape to freedom that the others could not even imagine, and which he invites Red to share. It was faith not in religion but in his own resilience and in the creation of each positive act in the direction of his own liberation that sustained him throughout his ordeal. 

Andy was an oddity in that terrible place: he started a library, and commenced prisoner education classes, he offered financial advice to the guards and the warden, he played Italian opera over the PA system, he negotiated to get two beers apiece for his friends who were tarring the roof one summer day as part of prison detail, he did things that made the other prisoners feel free. 

To a mind such as his, time was linear. Actions added up and cumulatively generated momentum. But in the 19 years of his incarceration for a crime he had not committed, he had time to thoroughly consider the circular shape of karmic causality and consequence: cause and effect. And to free himself of its cycle of suffering. 

In his last conversation with Red, in the prison yard, before his escape, Andy comments that he killed his wife - not technically, because he did not pull the trigger of the gun which shot her - but because he inadvertently shut her out of his life, by being ‘a hard man to know... a closed book’. He left her alone, emotionally, and she looked outside the marriage for emotional response and affection, and this got her killed by a break and enter robber who was trying to rob the home of her lover, while she was there. 

By claiming responsibility on that deeper level, morally rather than legally, Andy restores his own status as a human being. He says, ‘Bad luck... floats around. Has to land on somebody... It was my turn, that was all. I was in the path of the tornado. I just had no idea that the storm would go on as long as it has’. 

Instead of blaming his wife, which many people would have done, for the adultery which incriminated him, Andy goes further and deeper, and acknowledges his co-creation of the problem, understanding that his wife, like all human beings, was seeking happiness - and could not be wholly blamed by him for that. 

This ‘no fault’ attitude frees him to act, even within the limits of the prison, and to actively seek both physical and intellectual pathways to freedom, while the rest of the convict cohort are paralyzed by the prison system and their own experience of being institutionalized. ‘Whatever mistakes I made, I paid for them, and then some’, Andy tells Red. He dares to dream big: to go to Mexico, to find and buy a small hotel, and fix a broken sailing boat and take his guests charter fishing. ‘It’s not too much to ask’, he says. It is truly an attitude ‘only a free man can feel’. 

That film came out in movie theatres 25 years ago. I still think the final scene, with the sweep shots of the Pacific Ocean, the visual embodiment of freedom, is one of the most satisfying in the history of cinema. It made full sense of all the suffering and anguish the characters had experienced, and gave them an earned and richly deserved reward. 

Andy tells Red in the prison yard that he thinks Red underestimates himself. Red had said he could not dream of the Pacific Ocean - ‘it would scare me, something that big’. But, in the voiceover for that closing scene, Red says: ‘I hope to make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope that the Pacific Ocean is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope’.

Our days are linear, but the seasons of the world are cyclical. With a geological perspective, we too can perhaps see how pressure and time operate to shape and direct our own actions. And with that knowledge, we could work even within the restrictions and limits of the material world, to make our seemingly improbable dreams come true.