I recently watched the movie Leap Year for the first time. It wasn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen, but I found that one quote remained pounding in my brain. Anna Brady is a city girl trekking across Ireland in a pair of $600 stilettos, just to give you an idea of what kind of character you’re dealing with here. At one point in the movie, her escort asks her what she would take with her if she awoke to find her house on fire and only had 60 seconds to grab something and get out. At that particular point in time, she doesn’t have an answer.
Flash forward to the final ten minutes of the movie: Anna is back in America celebrating her engagement to her boyfriend of four years. She has felt completely out of place since her Irish escort took her on the adventure of a lifetime and turned her world upside down. She pulls the fire alarm just to see what her fiance would do with his 60 seconds. The next scene finds her back in Ireland recounting her 60 second experience to the man who had planted the question in her mind. Her words were close to (if not exactly) this:
I realized when my 60 seconds came that I had everything I ever wanted, but nothing that I really need.
I think this is a huge problem in our world. I believe that the reason most of us never achieve our fairytale romance is because we’re not willing to wait for the one we truly need. We long for an instant fairytale – one that develops in the short amount of time it takes to read the book. We rush the process, forgetting that there are often large spaces of time that pass between the “once upon a time” and the “happily ever after.” Just like Anna from the movie, we rush against time and all odds into a future that may not be right for us. After everything she suffers throughout the course of the movie, she discovers she was never meant to be Mrs. Sloane, but “Mrs. O’Brady Callaghan.”
I want to encourage you to take a step back, look at your life, and ask yourself this question: Where will you be when your 60 seconds come?
