“I know what I have to do now. Gotta keep breathing. Because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring.”
– Chuck Noland (Cast Away)
What happens when you take a work-a-holic control freak obsessed with timekeeping and punctuality and strand him on an island with nowhere to go, nowhere to be, and no schedule or routine to follow? I honestly don’t know, but in the movie Cast Away, you get a pretty good idea about how it might look.
I am not a psychic, but I know what you might be thinking. How on Earth can I consider the movie Cast Away to be inspirational? Like many of the other movies on my list, it goes beyond just what you see on the screen and straight to the several messages that Chuck provides. Not all of them with words.
Cast Away follows a FedEx executive named Chuck Noland who gets stranded on a small island by himself. In the very beginning, it is made clear that he works hard, works often, and is committed to punctuality and the maintenance of a tight and strict schedule. You could even argue that he finds himself in his situation due to his work-a-holic nature.
Throughout the ordeal, Chuck finds himself having to find new values to his life. Values that he never considered or couldn’t see because he had the same tunnel vision that a lot of us have. Values that he overlooked when he was safe at home with his girlfriend. Chuck develops flexibility, adaptation to change, optimism, and hope.
Under the worst of circumstances, when all else fails or nothing is going right, you have to take inventory of what you have. Chuck had a few items that he was able to recover and make use of, but it was the value that he couldn’t see that made all the difference. Hope. He eventually learned that as long as he lived and breathed, his salvation was possible.
Journeyman's Legacy 