Creative Gifts: A Lottery Ticket for Life
A hard lesson from Good Will Hunting's Chuckie Sullivan
Sam and I watched Good Will Hunting last night. Chuckie Sullivan’s speech to Will on his ‘winning lottery ticket’ made me smile. It is the hard version of the soft lessons we’ve been learning during the first week of your new Walk the Pod Series on ‘Gifts.’
I’ve been pootling around talking about how we may have a responsibility to use our gifts, when we identify that we have them. That it will take a huge volume of work to get to the point where we are ready to receive them fully. That, “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” as Mary Oliver so beautifully put it.
But Mary Oliver could not have got through to Will Hunting. Will’s best friend, Chuckie, needs to get a message to him, having seen his rejection of all the help he’s being offered over many weeks and months. Chuckie and Will are standing on a construction site, somewhere in Boston, and he starts:
CHUCKIE: Look, you're my best friend, so don't take this the wrong way. In twenty years, if you're still livin' here, comin' over to my house to watch the Patriots game, still workin' construction, I'll fuckin' kill you.
WILL: What?
CHUCKIE: That's not a threat, that's a fact. I'll fuckin' kill you.
WILL: What the fuck are you talkin' about?
CHUCKIE: Look, you got something that none of us have—
WILL: Oh, come on! Why- Why is it always this? I mean, "I fuckin' owe it to myself to do this or that", what if I don't want to?
CHUCKIE: No, no, no. No, fuck you. You don't owe it to yourself. You owe it to me. 'Cause tomorrow, I'm gonna wake up and I'll be fifty. And I'll still be doin' this shit. And that's alright, that's fine. I mean, you're sitting on a winning lottery ticket and you're too much of a pussy to cash it in. And that's bullshit. 'Cause I'd do anything to fuckin' have what you got, so would any of these fuckin' guys. It'd be an insult to us if you're still here in twenty years. Hanging around here is a fuckin' waste of your time.
WILL: You don't know that.
CHUCKIE: I don't?
WILL: No, you don't know that.CHUCKIE: I don't know that. Let me tell you what I do know; every day, I come by your house and I pick you up. And we go out, we have a few drinks, and a few laughs, and it's great. You know what the best part of my day is? It's for about ten seconds when I pull up to the curb to when I get to your door. 'Cause I think maybe I'll get up there and I'll knock on the door and you won't be there. No goodbye, no "see ya later", no nothin'. You just left. I don't know much, but I know that.
Wow, Chuckie. Wow. I would not speak to my listeners like that! But Chuckie and Will are best friends. And this speech, starting, “No, no, no. No, fuck you.” (an incredibly arresting way to start a speech—using a piece of rhetoric called ‘asterismos’ from the Greek meaning ‘marking with stars’) is Chuckie’s last, desperate attempt to take his friend by both shoulders and shake him into taking responsibility for the rest of his life.
Whether the central values of the film are actually correct or not is up to you. Is it genuinely better to ‘sit in a room and do long division for the next fifty years’, rather than to live quietly in the same neighbourhood as your best friend, ‘have little kids, take 'em to Little League together, up Foley Field.’ I don’t know, but I think Will would have regretted not at least trying the creative life of hard maths for a little while, in his old age.
I’ve had a lovely week pondering ‘Gifts’ with you as I’ve taken 10 minutes to walk in nature and pay attention to what’s directly in front of me. I’ve enjoyed your contributions via text and voice note, and I can’t wait to see where we get to next with this fascinating topic. If you haven’t listened to the new series yet, the best place to start is here. If you’ve been listening along, and you’d like to contribute your thoughts on the topic, you can leave me a voice note here.